Wedding Venue on a Budget

My fiance and I were born and raised in the city of Philadelphia, which is where we still live and I must say a wedding in Philadelphia can be pretty darn expensive. There are tons of hotels, museums and clubs in the area that are absolutely beautiful but charge a per person rate of $50.00 or more (mostly more!) and we certainly do not have that type of money to spend. And you know people say "Well, I'll wait until I get enough money....blah, blah, blah". But my question is what is enough? We both will always have bills and living expenses so I am sure we will never have what we feel is enough! But I digress...lol.
Any who, we did some brainstorming and decided that we needed to find a fire or banquet hall because they would be the most reasonable. There were 2 things that were really important to us;
      1. We needed to find a place that would allow us to bring our own food.
      2. We also needed a place where we could have both our ceremony & reception since we do not   
          belong to a church.
We did some fishing and we found a banquet hall called "Park Avenue Banquet Hall" in west Philadelphia, across from Fairmount Park. The price for rental of the main ballroom on a Saturday evening for 5 hours is $1,500 which just includes the rental space, tables and chairs. I was very impressed with the room when I saw it. The room is completely covered in white drapes and they also have perimeter lighting which makes it look even more nice.

Picture of a wedding reception in the main ballroom.

And like I said before, we also needed a site where we could also host our ceremony as well. We first agreed that we would have both the ceremony and reception in the same room with guests seated at their tables for the ceremony. My mother and I really weren't to fond of the idea but we were going to just tough it out anyway. Then my mom came up with the idea of asking ParkAvenue if we could have one of he rooms upstairs (the Ivory Room) for our ceremony, she's so smart! We have the balance payed off so I figured we should be allowed to. They are letting us have it for an extra $200...nothing ever comes for free....lol. It is just a plain old room and I am honestly not too fond of the tan and brown walls but hey, I am a girl on a budget and I trust that my mom will work her magic on the room and make it look awesome. 

The Ivory Room (empty)

So now we are putting our heads together to figure out how we are going to decorate the rooms, we pretty much have finalized our decorations for the reception, we just need ideas for the ceremony room. I know that I am going to have an aisle runner and I am thinking about getting some small pillars or something. Still working it out but we obviously do not have that much time left. I will definitely post pictures of our finished product!!