Our Wedding: Reception Tables Layout

Now that you know all the details about our centerpieces and table names, I wanted to share how we finalized the set-up for the reception and organized everything at home. 

I'm not even gonna lie..we started putting tables together before we even received RSVPs.  Heck, probably before we even sent out the invitations.  If we needed something wedding related to work on, we started planning out tables.  We knew that they would most likely get rearranged later on once people started to RSVP, but we would figure that out later on.  And, to be honest, working on this so far in advance really did help!

We started with family and figured out the best way to group all of them together.  We grouped families together, family friends together, church friends, college friends, etc., etc. 

To easily group all of the guests together, we printed out everyone's name on a piece of paper and cut them into strips.  When looking at this picture of all those strips of paper, I like to quote Matt by saying, "We only invited a handful of people." haha.

So that big ol' handful of names was then grouped into tables of 7 to 10 people. 

Looking back at all of this part of the planning, I have to say, this process really made me laugh, and do you want to know why?

Conveniently, an air hockey table has the exact same layout as The Rotunda inside the Science Museum.

And, luckily, we have an air hockey table upstairs in "wedding central!" haha.  

That larger circle in the middle of the table?.....that became the pendulum inside The Rotunda. You can see the pendulum here...

The first table to put down was the head table with the wedding party, because we knew that table was completely set and nothing would be changing.  Next, we figured out the parents & grandparents table, because they needed to have the best seats.  This ended up being two tables put together, but still one big table.

After getting those two tables out of the way, all we had to do next, was grab the stacks of names and put them into some sort of a layout on the table, to make our floor plan for the reception.  We loved our set-up, because we tried our best to make sure everyone had a good view of the dance floor and head table.  I don't know about you, but I always hate it when I go to a wedding and can't see any of the dances or anything of those things, so we tried our best to make sure everyone could {even if they didn't want to! haha}.

Once we had the groups of people figured out, and a basic layout made, we worked on deciding what table name would work best for each table.  For example, we put all of our college friends at the Longwood University table.  Yeah, that one's a given!  But then, we put church friends, such as the Zehlers and Warthans, at the West Palm Beach table, because two of the people at that table, Susan and Brandy, went on mission trips with us, too!  We put my cousin, Jacquelyn, and all of that family at the Nagshead table, because that's where she had her wedding!  You get the picture, right?  It was pretty easy, actually, deciding all of the tables.

When this step was complete, we put all of the picture frames for that table on top of the stack of names.

On the left of that picture, you see the three strips of paper? That showed us what color the table would be.  They were all spaced our perfectly, and oh my gosh was it so much easier than I thought! So, by looking at that quickly, I see that the Nagshead table was green, The Campground table was pink, and the West Palm Beach table was orange!

On the right of that picture, you can see folded up colored paper with white pieces of paper inside them.  These were the placecards that I made.  Literally, everything for the tables was put together so it was so easy to see what was missing or what was still needed.

As we got closer to the wedding date, the air hockey table was very full and very colorful....