Ceremony Site Size Advice

BlueRasammiMoon

So my fiance and I are looking to get married in an outdoor venue in a small rural town.  We are expecting about 150 guests are doing pretty much everything by ourselves.  We are wondering how much space we should estimate 150 regular folding chairs will take up for the ceremony, with an aisle separating the two sides.  We have found a few locations that we like  but they are on the smaller side.  Earlier in the year, when we were doing more wedding location shopping, we realized that the size needed for a ceremony is very deceiving as a few locations said that they held 150 people, but we would have never guessed that.So basically, Im just wondering if anyone has any guestimates about how much space we will need/how much we can get away with?  Spacial elements are misleading so we need help!

aerinpegadrak

Do you have a program like Photoshop or Illustrator?  Or even MS Paint?  I use Illustrator for all of my room layouts, it works beautifully.  I take detailed measurements of all of the elements I need to fit in, then I make representative shapes in Illustrator, with the scale being 10 pixels = 1 inch.  So what I would do in your case is find a folding chair and measure out how much space a person takes up while seated.  (Be sure to leave enough leg room.)  Then plug that into your design program and copy-paste 149 more.  Find an aisle runner that gives its dimensions to figure out how large your aisle is.  Then draw a box around the whole thing, and see how big it is.  That's how much room you need.I believe there are a couple of free room layout programs around if that sounds a little complicated, but I haven't used any myself.

Catwoman708

That's a good question. I think most venues should know the room/area maximum capacity. I would have guessed about a square yard per person while seated, just for the actual seating area. I Googled "how to calculate room capacity", and got the site below. You enter the number of guests and the room square footage, and type of seating (theatre, banquet, meeting...). Another site mentioned 11 square feet per person for groups of 60-300 people. But I think that was more total room occupancy standards, not necessarily for seating. http://www.eventageous.com/planning_guides/peoplecalc.htm