Many people dream of having a wedding at home, but few people make it happen. With the help of family and I’m sure a few friends Mike + Nikki will be having a wedding at home, on the family farm where Nikki grew up in Virginia. The ceremony will be outside overlooking the fields and mountains and the barns will be dressed up for a reception where they’ll share a meal of fresh and local food. It will be a day filled with personal touches and the kind of details that can only take place when you have a wedding at home in the country. I was able visit for their engagement session - and you all saw the gorgeous setting from those images – and I can’t wait for their wedding in October.
Of course, while I’m waiting, they are working. I checked in with Mike and Nikki and asked them to share their progress and experience as they prepare for the wedding. I know how much work they are putting in and I thought you would all enjoy seeing how they pull everything together. They left their Manhattan home to visit over the 4th of July and Mike wrote about their trip and plans for the wedding:
July 3, 2010 – 113 days and counting.
It’s 10am on Saturday morning and I can already feel the beads of sweat forming on my back. Looking out on the rolling Virginia hills in front of me I can see the heat coming off the corn fields. It’s hot now, and it’s only going to get worse. Eighteen hours and one short plane ride ago we were on an air conditioned trading floor in Manhattan, and I was part of a group frantically trying to wrap up the mid year performance estimate to send to our anxious investors. But that was our real lives back at the hedge fund in New York. For this long Fourth of July weekend, and many more to come for the next several months, we’ll be down here on the Jebson’s farm sweating it out and putting in a lot of elbow grease to make their cute farm into our ideal wedding location.
This is the farm Nikki grew up in; it’s a beef farm with nearly 100 head of cattle and sits on about 150+ acres of land in Culpeper, VA, which is about 1.5 hours southwest of Washington DC. For her, this is home. For me, it’s a world away from my suburban New Jersey upbringing, and even further from my stuffy New York City studio. The Jebsons’ seem to think of this as work, for me it’s like I’m in a giant sandbox, with all my trucks, only the box is much bigger and the trucks are real. If they think that I think digging things up with backhoes is work they’re sorely mistaken.
It’s not the first time we’ve been here to work; back in June we came down for a weekend to start knocking out fences and plant a garden. This weekend we will finish the demolition, start some cleaning, and focus on painting. Every wedding guest is going to receive a homemade jar of pickled green beans and cucumbers, Mrs. Jebson’s specialty. We wanted to incorporate as many aspects of the farm as possible and this being a beef farm, the reception’s main course was an easy call.
For the ceremony we’ll be getting married on top of a hill just behind the house. It’s the highest point on the farm and in October the sun will be setting just off our shoulders but far enough to the left not to make our guests squint. We’ll face the mountains to the west, with vast cornfields down the hill to our right and cow pastures down the other side of the hill to the left. Mr. Jebson will use the tractor and planting equipment to smooth out the hill, so the land will be flattened and our guests will sit comfortably on rows of square hay bales.
Behind the ceremony, closer to the house, there is a cluster of four barns, three of them are rectangular and line up parallel to each other. One barn closer to the house is the cattle barn, where one or a few cows are kept when they’re not in the fields. It’s the biggest and most suitable for the reception with big sliding doors, a couple open sides, and it’s made of really old oak. Unfortunately it’s also full of 100 year old hay, old doors, broken tools, and just about anything else you can imagine saying “eh, just throw it in the barn” to. My main job this weekend was to continue ripping down one of the older and more beat up sides. Additionally we started cleaning it out, which means getting all the hay out and identifying what can be thrown out and what can be salvaged elsewhere. After we finish cleaning it out Mr. Jebson is going to lay a new floor of concrete.
The forth barn near the house, and closest to the ceremony is named the calf barn because that’s where they often put the babies to nurse them after birth. Nikki, armed with an electrical paint gun contraption made this white cinderblock structure a classic barn red. We also painted the windowsills white for good measure. This is the most completed thing we’ve done so far and it looks great. 
There is a square fenced in area between the calf barn and the reception barn and this is where we’ll have outdoor seating around a bon fire complete with whiskey and cigars. The fence, which has been ripped down, was old and not in very good shape. Later this summer we will be building a new one and painting it white. Right now it’s hard to imagine but in three months these buildings which are more suited for barn cats and tractors are going to host an elegant dinner for nearly 200 people!
Thanks for sharing your progress and I can’t wait to document the wedding and see the hard work you’ve put in!
by Mary Dougherty
3 comments