If you’re in the middle of your wedding planning process, you can be forgiven for furniture not even appearing on your radar just yet. After all, there’s a whole load of other, more exciting, elements to your wedding that will no doubt take priority, such as the wedding dress, the catering, the cake, luxury cars and much, much more.
When you do decide to start looking at furniture for weddings, though, you’ll find yourself in one of two camps. Either your wedding venue will be providing the furniture such as your wedding tables and chairs as part of your all-in package, or you’ll need to sort the event furniture hire yourselves, especially if you’re going down the route of hiring a blank-canvas event space and furnishing it off your own backs.
Due to the temporary nature of weddings (ie 1 day!), the natural choice is to rent wedding furniture when you need it. That said, like anything else in this world, there’s always pros and cons of doing anything, and wedding furniture hire is no exception. Perhaps it’s not a question of whether you should buy or hire furniture for wedding days, but to just be aware of any downsides that there might be.
First, however, let’s take a look at the benefits of renting furniture for a wedding.
PROS
Convenience
Whilst there are many benefits of hiring wedding furniture, perhaps the most important and significant is the convenience. A furniture hire company will be able to deliver direct to your venue the day before your wedding, and then collect it the day after your wedding. You won’t have the hassle of trying to arrange transport, nor – in many cases – will you have the hassle of setting up the chairs at your wedding venue. Literally, you simply place your order and then sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that your wedding furniture is taken care of.
Cost
And, just as importantly, as well as renting wedding furniture being the most convenient way of doing things, it’s also the most cost-effective. Can you imagine actually buying lots of chairs and tables to furnish your wedding venue? This is unrealistic. When you rent wedding furniture, you pay per item. A wedding chair might cost you in the region of £5, whilst a round banqueting table might be more like £10. As a result, you can furnish a wedding venue both affordably and stylishly, especially when you bear in mind that most furniture hire companies will also offer table linen such as tablecloths, table runners and napkins in a variety of colours, including white and ivory, so that you can create that quintessentially English wedding look and finish.
No hidden costs!
If you take a moment to think about if you were to buy furniture for your wedding, then you’ll soon realise that there would be lots of hidden costs associated with this as well, which you should avoid! Not only would you have to invest in the furniture in the first place, but you’d then need to store it, maintain it, transport it and, when you’ve finished with it, you’d need to sell it on, no doubt at a loss. It just doesn’t make any sense to buy wedding furniture – hire it!
With such persuasive reasons as those above, we’d suggest that the pros will always outweigh the cons, but let’s take a look at them anyway.
CONS
It’s not your own
OK, so if you hire wedding furniture, it’s not your own, but – actually – do you really need it to be? Temporary events such as weddings call for temporary solutions, not permanent solutions!
Unless you order early, it might not be 100% to your taste
Like anything else, the best equipment is the most popular and in most demand. The classic Chiavari wedding chair, for instance, is the one that you see in glossy bridal magazines and across Instagram wedding pages. It stands to reason, therefore, that these chairs will experience huge demand, especially in the summer months. If you don’t order early, then you run the risk of ‘settling’ for something else, whether it’s a different colour of Chiavari chair to the classic limewash or a different style of chair altogether. OK, so it’s not the end of the world, but we’re sure you’ll want your wedding day to be perfect in every way!
‘As-new’ vs ‘brand-new’
And talking about being perfect, remember that rental furniture is exactly that – rented. This means that it goes out regularly to weddings and events. And what does that mean? Well, potentially there is the opportunity for it to be knocked or scratched both during transportation and on site at these events. This isn’t brand-new furniture you are hiring, but hire stock. We’d always advise to work with a furniture hire company that regularly carries out TLC on their furniture in between hires – a bit of a paint touch-up goes a long way in making the chair look ‘as-new’, even though the chances are it’s not ‘brand-new’.
So, there are the pros and cons of renting wedding furniture for your big day. When the time comes, do what is right for you. Remember, we all have budgets to work to, and what we would say is that renting wedding tables and chairs provides you with an affordable way to furnish your wedding venue, so that’s got to be a great reason to hire instead of buying.
All that remains for us to say, in advance of your big day, is CONGRATULATIONS!
