Once used by Minnesota dairy farmers, barns are now big business in the wedding world.
But WCCO found hundreds of the old buildings are at the center of a costly controversy. When Wayne Butt and his wife entered the wedding barn business five years ago, they say they weren’t prepared for the amount of money and the politics at play for your big day.
“I want people to be educated on what’s safe about a venue,” Butt said. “The couple is looking for pretty, and infrastructure’s not pretty.”
A fire suppression system senses smoke or flames, triggering sprinklers to shoot water from the ceiling.
“I’m looking at all the competition around us and realize they’re not doing the same thing,” he said.
Butt says they paid the $350,000 for the pricey piping at the start, but found very few followed the same setup — just 15.