HELP with dressing reception venue... please

[Malley8]

I’m getting married next year and have hired a local hall for my reception... the budget it tight and wanted to ask for help with how you would dress this room.
I wanted wall draping but the quote of £1400 put me off that idea as that is nearly 5 x the amount to rent the hall for the weekend.

I’m not allowed to use pins on the walls and anything that needs to be stuck on them needs to be fixed with blue tack.... also helium balloons are not allowed.

Any clever creatives have any ideas? it’s a summery August wedding and I’m hoping to create a rustic feel

Can you hire in large plants, trees etc in pots
Instant impact, then drape them in battery operated fairy lights
Can you cover the stage area floor in either white fabric (are you using the stage bit) or Astro turf. Drape something over the front edge of the stage.
Can you find someone else\group to share the hall ie you on the Saturday them on the Sunday. And share costs.

Nothing a ton of fairy lights can’t fix! If going rustic maybe just using lots of greenery. Check out Pinterest - that where I hit these from.

Can you borrow fairy lights? Amazon also do a good and cheap line in fake ivy. I have made bunting out of paper doilies and twine.

I actually think the hall itself is fine and would make it all about the table decorations.
If you want stuff on the walls then you can easily "swag" fabric and fairy lights from the rafters as they seem to have a gap behind them?

This was at a wedding I went to and it was beautiful.

50m of muslin fabric is just over £100 on eBay. That would create the drapes from Pip's first photo - you could use long cable ties to hold to the rafters.

Lots of fairy lights. Jars of big open pale pink roses or peonies on your tables.

You can hire certain props which might help you - wedding prop hire. If they are too expensive it will atleast give you ideas

Buy lights after Christmas when they are cheap, but cheap voile. Collect pine cones and other natural stuff. Avoid stupid shiny confetti etc, they are plastic. Potted plants look good as table centres and scattered about, can re use!

We used white paper bunting to dress our room - loads cheaper and it looked a lot less twee than material bunting - we got loads of compliments

Something like this -
rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F201479749854

We also went to ikea and bulk bought loads of glass bottles (think they were about 50p each) and then filled them with flowers from Aldi and Lidl the night before - they were actually really good quality. We just went for a mix of all different types but it looked really lovely (although I'd definitely recommend doing a few practice runs before). It was lovely getting family to help the night before as well - they all seemed to really enjoy being involved with helping.

If you want rustic I'd go for hessian table runners ( cheap enough on eBay), collect fir cones and logs from a local park/wooded area ( or you can buy on eBay/fb market place. I wouldn't worry about drapes but if you want something up I'd put bunting up instead of drapes ( again hessian style ) can be bought on eBay/fb cheap.

I'd have jam jars with wild flowers and tea lights on the logs and put the fur cones along the runners or around the logs.

All can be collected or bought cheaply. Fairly lights around the bunting also looked beautiful.

I love bunting. Looks like it can be tied in place on beams?

The room has light and a white ceiling so you're off to a good start straight away . Voile off eBay is about £4 a roll , get 2 different colours intertwine them with lights? I second supermarket flowers , I got married last year and had a local cafe saving certain glass bottles for me as they were a nice shape so they cost me nothing then bought flowers 2-3 days before from Lidl and Morrison's, that room has great potential.

We bought swag fabric, fairy lights, strings of plastic ivy, bunting, etc for as cheap as possible online (usually amazon) and then sold it all on gumtree after for not much less than we originally paid

We collected loads of ivy and draped it all about with entwined fairy lights. It looked really beautiful and was cheap as.

Fairy lights. Also can buy command hooks on strips that come away cleanly to hang other things up. Ask a garden centre if you can borrow/hire some nice plants in tubs (bay trees or the like)

Can you hire board screens, angle them at the corners and drape them with voile and lights.

My tip is to type wedding photographer/photography + venue name into google. This should bring up pictures from other couples weddings so you can see how they dressed the hall. That's what I did for my wedding when I had similar concerns about how to dress it.

Also stalk their location tags on Instagram and Facebook 😁. Look on the hash tag for the venue name too and just on their social media pages.

Thank you so much for all the responses on here... I didn’t think this actually posted as I got an error message, thank you for all the ideas!

I need to go back and measure it as I didn’t think to do that so have no idea how much of anything I need.

@Dec2019mumtobe that’s a great idea, that would never of even occurred to me to do that !