Draping--a big cost to any event

Many brides love the idea of draping--yards and yards of billowing fabric that masks unwanted venue areas or creates ambiance and mood in a room. You can do a lot with draping, in any color, texture or style. You can change the look of a room, create a romantic or fun vibe to any event, create a room within a room, or just simply use it to section off unwanted and unsightly areas. Unfortunately, draping can be very expensive. It doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg, but if you have large areas to cover, the labor and the fabric can do you in before you know.

Many brides think that the draping in the pictures looks easy and they can do it themselves. After all, how hard can it be to hang fabric? Trust me when I say that this is something better left to the professionals. There are many venue coordinators that have horror stories of brides and their families nailing holes in the walls, using tape, tacks, wire and all sorts of other adhesives that they have had to peel from their walls, patch up or just simply had to replaster over. This gets expensive!

But it isn't just the brides and their families that cause venue damage. There are planners and decorators that come into a venue and take over! Instead of asking what can we do, they barge right in and start to do things that no one should even try. Imagine trying to drape an airplane in a museum! A museum of all places!! Common sense alone would tell you not to touch the exhibits. I had one director tell me that he now asks all of his brides if they are working with a planner or a decorator. If the bride says yes, then he ask who and if it is one particular company, he refuses their business. I asked him why he did that; "After putting in an entire new electrical system twice because she was consistently hanging things from our fixtures, we finally said enough. We can't afford to have her come here!"

It is better to leave the draping to the professionals who understand professional courtesy and respect of venue property. Now, having said that opens a whole new can of worms into a whole other blog---bad decorators.