So, recently we have hit a big bump in the wedding planning road. We had our meeting with our reception manager who mentioned to us that we should tell our decorator that we have a particular wedding planner booked as they "have bad blood" and she felt it was necessary that the decorator was aware. We did exactly as she asked and it stirred up so much drama. Like, I feel like I'm back in high school dealing with all of this!
We've had some differences with the decorator and she hasn't 100% made us feel comfortable with her throughout the planning of our big day. At our meeting at the reception site we had the manager put together what the head table would have looked like if we went with round tables to get a feel for it as our decorator only had the table cloths we wanted in a certain colour in rounds. I emailed her after the meeting to let her know that we decided to go with the normal banquet style head table and that we would need to then choose different linens. This is the email where I brought up hiring the wedding planner and asked her if it would be too difficult for her to work with her that day. I was very genuine in the email and said that we wanted to ensure that both parties (decorator and planner) were happy and stress free that day and would do whatever it took to keep them both that way. She became defensive and immediately started throwing stuff at us. She made a comment about how she "read between the lines in my previous emails" that I lack confidence in her ability to pull off the look we want in our venue space because we have taken items away from her. My decorator was under the impression that she would be putting out the escort cards and the table seating chart but I pay my wedding planner to do this.. it's actually in the contract that the planner gave us. Why would I pay 2 different people to do the exact same job when I only require one person to do it? It just didn't make sense. These are the items she is referring to as being taken away from her.
This decorator had it in her head that she legitimately was going to plan EVERYTHING in our venue space when we first met, even though we never agreed to any of it. Along the way we changed our colours and removed some unnecessary things, such as faux flowers, because we didn't want them. She wanted to do all of my bouquets in the faux flowers including our centrepieces. I worked as a florist and despise faux flowers. I knew that it wasn't something that I wanted for the day, especially with having a spring wedding. I could see using them for a winter wedding, but not in June. We had talked about possibly putting lights on the ceiling as I hate the look of the ceiling in our reception space but she wanted $500 to put up a few strands of string lights. So, obviously we cut that out too. We also had planned on having a kids table because we thought we were going to be having 10+ children at the wedding, but most of the guests with kids decided to come without children. It would be completely useless keeping a kids table when these children will be with their parents.
At the end of the email she basically insinuated that we don't think that she can pull this off and offered to give us our $500 retainer back. I talked to my planner about why she gets so defensive about her and found out a whole bunch of details that honestly would have deterred us from booking this decorator in the first place. I have never met a more jealous, harsh decorator before who requires you to stroke her ego whenever she is feeling attacked. She has attempted to have my planner kicked out of different venues because she doesn't want to cross paths with her so she will make up stories and rumours about her in hopes that it works. It hasn't worked out for her. She was contacted by the managers at the venues to cut it out or she wouldn't be allowed back there.
Our decorator is under a lot of stress as they found out before Christmas that her husband has cancer. There were rumours that they were thinking of closing the doors for good. At this time I reached out and offered to help alleviate some stress for her. We said we would understand that if she needed this time to be with her husband that we would figure things out on our own. I'm a nurse and have had a friend die of cancer and know the time and energy you will be spending with these people over the next few months as they go through treatment. She promised us that all was well and that they would be back up and running in no time and looked forward to decorating for us this June.
Every time my decorator is feeling stressed out about something she tends to take it out on her couples. This time I was at the brunt end of it. She hasn't been easy to deal with and refuses to sign a contract for us. Her response to us when we asked for a contract was that she's done weddings for lawyers and they were okay with it. It just makes me roll my eyes. She's the type of person you can't push because then she finds a way to manipulate you and make you feel as though you were the one doing/saying something wrong.
Our planner said that she can easily find somebody to commission to do the work that we would have required from the decorator if we chose to "fire" her. This new decorator would give us a contract. The only thing is I used to work with this woman and she was my decorator for my previous wedding. She called me bridezilla at that wedding because I left her a list of things to fix in the venue site that she didn't abide by in the contract we had filled out. My FH and I have stayed away from booking with people who I had previously booked years ago because we didn't want to feel like we were doing what I did previously. Also, this woman came up to us at a wedding show and asked right away who we had booked as a decorator. When we told her we were going with this other decorator she tried to deter us from booking her. Obviously we should have listened... but now it's going to be one of those "I told you so" situations and she will likely throw it in my face.
What would you do? They both do amazing work. We are scared that the one we have booked already will decide just to back out and not show up the day of the wedding because she can do that as she wouldn't give us a contract. I've made sure to keep all of our emails back and forth to each other in case anything ever happened and legal action was needed. Or would you go with decorator 2, despite there being bad blood before? My planner works REALLY well with her and would ensure that we got everything we wanted out of her. If we fire our currently hired decorator we would have to wait until the end of April to get our retainer back as she is out of town. She told me that during this time of her being away that she would rather not email if anything came up and that we could deal with it at the end of the month.... my florist was just out of town for nearly 2 months, traveling around the whole world and STILL managed to get back to me in only a few hours time. We wouldn't even had known she was going out of town if I didn't send the email about hiring the planner!
Sorry, I know this is so long but we are both seriously lost and have no idea what we should really do.
Planning stress
