So you just got engaged. How do you go from new fiancé to bride? Where do you begin? It can be really overwhelming when you first begin the planning process. There are so many options out there now and with Pinterest, you have access to millions of ideas from other brides. Now, I'm no planning or wedding expert by any means, but I do want to share what I learned along the way and my thoughts on wedding planning.
Let me start off with saying that we loved our wedding. Everything went as planned and we didn't have one single hiccup the entire day. I know it's rare that brides say that. There's usually always some story about someone not showing up or something going awry, but not for us. I'm very grateful and so happy with all the vendors we chose because in the end, it all went off without a hitch. I think with good planning and doing your research, your day can be just what you and your fiancé want.
More than likely, you're first step is to set a tentative date. I say tentative because once you start looking at venues, you may need to move your date a week or two if the venue is already booked. We had to do this, but received a discount from our venue for moving our date! Keep in mind that while you can have any type of wedding theme you want, it is your wedding afterall, but some seasons will be better for certain themes. If your heart is set on a winter wonderland themed wedding, picking a date in July may not work out too well.
Aside from picking a date, I think one of the first things you should do is decide on a theme. Now, your wedding doesn't need to have a straight forward theme like under the sea but you do need to have some sort of overall feel to your wedding. This will help you in picking out everything from your dress, to the venue to your décor. Think of how you want your wedding to feel to guests, what image and emotions do you want to portray? We wanted our wedding to have a simple, elegant and classic feel. This helped with picking out colors because theme/feel and colors can work together or work against each other. It would be hard to have a country chic wedding if your colors were black and neon green, ya know?
our colors were dark teal, white and grey
When planning all other details, we kept in mind our colors and our theme. It can get incredibly overwhelming researching wedding ideas on Pinterest. While I think it's a great way to do some research and get ideas for what you like, I think it can also create stress. As the bride you feel like you want everything that you see and that's just not feasible. When on wedding planning overload, it really helps to think back to your theme and your budget. Sure, you love those custom mason jar favors, but if your theme is hawaiian luau, they're not going to fit in. Now, I don't mean that you can't do whatever you want. But sticking to a common theme can really help you from feeling like you want everything you see at your wedding, but can't afford it.
guest book table
Speaking of being able to afford things, you and your fiancé must also set a budget. If your parents are helping out, all of you should sit down and talk about a budget before you begin making any plans. My fiancé and I paid for 90% of the wedding ourselves so we really had to sit down and talk about what we could afford and what aspects of the wedding were important to us. We had quite a small budget and were still able to pull off an amazing wedding that made us both happy and our guests enjoyed. When mapping out your budget, there are lots of tools online that can help you plan it out. I got ideas from The Knot but ended up creating a spreadsheet myself using Excel. Talk to your fiancé about what you feel more of the budget should be spent on and what things neither of you care about or can eliminate. For us, we did not feel the need to spend any money making programs. While these may be an important detail to others, we felt like our guests would probably just toss them out afterwards and wouldn't even notice their absence from our wedding.
centerpieces
cake and cupcakes
In order to save money, we did a lot of research with big ticket items like venue, photographer, DJ, etc. We also did a lot of DIY projects to help keep our costs down. I'll go into further detail about our vendor searches, little details and our DIY projects in the following weeks. There's just too much to write about in one post!
One last thing to keep in mind is that while this is your day, you want your guests to enjoy themselves. This really is a day of celebration for your new life together and you want to share this love and happiness with your friends and family. Also, things may go wrong the day of or the weeks leading up to your big day. Don't stress about it. Do the best you can at planning and anticipating any snafus, but in the end, no matter what happens, you're still married to your best friend.
All these pictures were taken by our amazing photographer, Nikki, owner of Nikki Marie Photography. She did sign over a copyright release to me for all photos taken at our wedding. Oh, and she's AMAZING!
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