Romantic Vintage Wedding

Taylor and Eric had a romantic vintage wedding at Taylor’s family home in Port Dover. They said ‘I do’ surrounded by their family and friends with the lake as their back drop!

COUPLE: Taylor & Eric Ruetz

DATE: September 9, 2023

LOCATION: Taylor’s Family Home, Port Dover “We decided on hosting our romantic vintage wedding at Taylor’s families’ home in Port Dover. The property backs onto Lake Erie, and we knew that it would be beautiful to get married overlooking the water. Our first date was on Lake Erie and it felt special to get married in the place we first fell in love. The ceremony was down the backyard hill and the tent reception was held in a flat park that is shared with the 17 neighbours in the front yard cul de sac.” – E

PHOTOGRAPHER: Have Heart Photography “Our amazing photographers, Ashley and Jason with Have Heart Photography shot our friend’s wedding in 2021. We loved their photos and heard such positive things about their experience. They were the first vendor that we hired for our day. We loved that Ashley and Jason captured us genuinely enjoying our day. It did not feel that we were in a photo shoot. They were the perfect choice to capture our romantic vintage wedding.” – E

COLOUR PALETTE: “Our overall theme was romantic vintage wedding. Our colours were french blue, wine red, dusty pink with gold and pearl accents. Throughout our 18 month engagement, we went into what felt like every antique store across southwestern Ontario to thrift vintage brass candlesticks. We also spent many hours on facebook marketplace finding vintage brass items such as mirrors, and other decor.” – T&E

TELL US YOUR STORY: “Our love story began in late March 2020 when we matched online in the very scary, early days of the pandemic. Our first date was on facetime and lasted for over 5 hours! At the time we lived an hour away from one another. We found ways to meet in person once after a month of FaceTime dates. Followed by 7 weeks of only Face time dates. As the only thing to do was talk, we really took the opportunity to get to know one another over those lengthy facetime dates and ultimately fell in love.” – T&E

FLOWER FRIENDS: “A unique thing that we did for our wedding was have Taylor’s friends be “Flower Friends”. It was important that these amazing women in her life were part of the wedding. So, we created the role as flower friend for them. Like a flower girl, but instead of throwing flower petals while walking down the aisle, they gave out jello shots. They were asked to pick any dress they liked within a colour palette and arrived before the ceremony for a big reveal with Taylor and for photos.” – E

WEDDING COORDINATOR: Nicole Anna Events

VIDEOGRAPHY: Yuri Rabin Productions

FLORALS: Creekside Growers

CATERING: Devlin’s Country Bistro and Catering

DJ: Pynx Productions

DECOR: Creative Country Designs

TENT: Drumbo Tent Company Ltd.

TRANSPORTATION: Sharp Bus Lines

GROOM & GROOMSMEN ATTIRE: Collins Formal Wear

BRIDE’S ATTIRE: Sophie’s Bridal

BRIDESMAIDS ATTIRE: Heirlooms Bridal

BIGGEST CHALLENGE: “The biggest challenge was all of the small details that went into having a backyard tent wedding. Being in a more residential area, we found out only a few months before, we needed to apply for a noise extension permit. After we applied for the extension, the county sent out letters to all neighbours within 400 metres of the property, notifying them of our application. Inviting them to object by a specific date if they had concerns.

We were told that if anyone objected, we would have to go to the next public county council meeting to petition to have our extension approved. This happened to be 3 days before the wedding! Thankfully, the majority of the neighbours were already invited to the wedding and no one objected. So our extension was granted. It was an extremely stressful month waiting to hear if we got the approval. In the end we are happy we got the extension, as no one wanted to leave the dance floor to get on the bus at 1:00am when the reception was officially over.” – E

FAVOURITE MEMORY: “One of the most challenging parts of having an outdoor tent wedding is not being able to know what the weather will be. We came across a southern american tradition of burying a bottle of bourbon one month before the wedding at the venue to ward off rain. Then digging it up the day of the wedding. During cocktail hour, we dug up the bottle we buried and took some shots out of it. It was a lot of fun to dig it up and celebrate that it worked because we had perfect weather!” – E&T

ADVICE FROM ONE COUPLE TO ANOTHER: “In Taylor’s family, large weddings are the norm (her parents had 400 people at their wedding!). A way that kept our numbers lower was, we wrote down every single person we could think of that we wanted to invite. We then figured out the cost per person to attend (food, alcohol, chair rentals, table rentals, etc). Then we carefully considered each name on the guest list. We agreed that if one of us had not met a person, they automatically went onto the “C” list. This method significantly decreased our guest list to a more reasonable level (170 people) who we knew and loved us the most. This method also prevented last minute people from being added to the guest list as invitations went out.” – T&E