Buildings that have been abandoned, such as churches, mansions and castles, can serve as surprisingly romantic wedding venues. If you've decided to use a building like this for your wedding, you'll probably need to do quite a lot of prep work to make it safe and pretty for your event. Below are two tips that you should follow when you do this.
Book a rubbish removal service
Abandoned buildings are hardly ever truly abandoned. In reality, they are intermittently occupied by groups of bored teenagers and by homeless people. As a result of this, you will probably find a lot of rubbish in the building, which you'll have to remove to ensure that your wedding guests don't have to put up with the smell of refuse whilst they dine or have to dance on a floor that's littered with cigarette butts and old beer cans. You should not bag this rubbish and take it home to your own rubbish bin but instead should gather it up and have it taken away from the building by a business that offers rubbish removal services.
The main reason for this is that you won't know which of this rubbish is hazardous. For example, if the building was temporarily occupied by people with substance abuse issues, there could be parts of broken, used needles amongst the rubbish that you collect or contaminated residue on the cigarette butts and empty bottles of alcohol. Taking this rubbish home in your car will only increase the chances of you touching something that is dangerously unsanitary (especially if any of the bags break whilst you're putting them into your car or taking them out of it).
If however, you collect these items carefully (i.e., whilst wearing gloves and using a pick-up tool) and let the rubbish removal company take this refuse away from the building, you can avoid having to worry about getting sick whilst preparing for your big day. Rubbish removal companies deal with hazardous refuse all the time and so can safely handle the removal of it from the building.
Be selective about which rubbish you get rid of
Whilst there will be some rubbish that you will obviously need to get the rubbish removal business to pick up (like food and drink containers, cigarette ashes and butts, etc.) there might be some items that have been left behind that it might be best not to throw away.
For instance, if the building is partly demolished (or just extremely rundown) and there are loose bricks or cement blocks strewn around it, you might want to keep these so that you can put pretty tealights on them and use them as rustic candle holders that, when scattered around the building on your wedding, will serve as soft and pretty light sources. Additionally, keeping any debris that could be useful will mean you'll have less refuse to give to the rubbish company, which should decrease the size of the bill they send you.