Imagine, getting ready for the big wedding day, you head to the venue, and the doors are locked.
“We're both just looking at each other like ‘you try, no you try,’” The bride’s mother, Patti Friedman said.
Friedman says when she and her daughter, the bride-to-be Melissa, arrived to Noah’s Event Venue in Overland Park, no one was there to let them in.
“If we can't get in, we don't have a wedding,” Friedman said.
Friedman says after her husband called employees with the venue’s alarm system, they were able to get a code from Noah’s corporate offices.
After they got in however, they say they experienced even more problems.
The place wasn’t ready, and hadn’t been cleaned from the wedding the night before.
“Full trash cans, but there hasn't been an event there, so it had to be from the night before,” Friedman said. “Trash by the toilets and dirty chairs that our guests are going to sit on, a place that's set up from the night before.”
41 Action News spoke with Noah’s Event Venue and they told us the employee that was supposed to open the building and prepare it, had quit without telling anyone. Corporate officials and Overland Park’s building manager say this is something that has never happened before and expressed their deepest apologies and refunded their money.
“It was horrible,” wedding planner Kelley Ruf said. “The feeling of helplessness is an understatement , it's just shock, disbelief, you have to be kidding me."
Ruf says in her 18 years of wedding planning, she’s never witnessed anything like this.
“We had just met with the venue and our representative a week before, confirming our table, our diagrams, our linens and everything else,” Ruf said. “And so who would not show up? How would the doors be locked?”
For Friedman, her daughter’s wedding was supposed to be a special day.
“This was on Mother's Day,” Friedman said. “Maybe some people would find that to be h my go my mother's getting married on Mother's Day,” she said. “But for me it made it more special not less.”
Despite the headaches, that didn’t stop the bride and groom’s big day, with some hard work, the ceremony started on time.
“Everybody wore many hats trying to clean up the best we could,” Friedman said.
Noah’s building manager stated since the incident, there are now two event coordinators instead of just one, to ensure this never happens again.
