As anyone who knows me or has happened to read my blog will know I am getting married next year!!! To be more precise I am getting married in 8 1/2 months. As such I thought I would do a series of posts about my experiences wedding planning.
The first place to start is BUDGET!
After you get engaged you will be full of ideas and dreams, the problem is that those ideas don't yet have a price tag and believe me the minute you put wedding in front of anything the price racks up. So the best thing to do after you get engaged, before you start thinking venue or date is find out what your budget is.
No use planning a wedding for a years time if you cant afford to pay for everything in that time frame. So have a sit down with the parents or your partner and work out what your end budget is.
For us we have a total of £15,000 to play with. From here I went a step further and would recommend you do the same. Start looking online at venues that you like and see if you can find a local wedding fair, best to do this at the same time as you can go look at a venue and visit a wedding fair all in one go. Whilst at the fair pick up as many leaflets and brochures as you can, I know this sounds odd but it will make sense.
Once you have all your brochures and have an idea of some venues its time to start costing your wedding. By this I mean taking your total budget and breaking it down to see how much you are going to spend on each item. Now I'm a big fan of a spreadsheet so for my budget I have a sheet with loads of different columns each showing a different calculation but you can just keep a list in a notebook. You want your total at the top then down the side you need a list of the different items you will need. Here is an idea of my list:
Venue
Registrar
Dress
Suits
Bouquet
Cake
Flowers
(bouquets, buttonholes, corsages)
Room Decorations
(centre pieces, chair ties)
Rings
Photographer
Invitations, Save the Dates etc
Postage
Wedding shoes
Favours
Gifts
Once you have the list you need to start breaking up your budget across the elements you want. First place to start is to look at those venues and see what sort of price they offer. Here you might hit a snag as lots of venues do food per head so use a guestimate of how many guests you will be having, as a rough guide 80 people is a decent number for a large wedding, gives each side 40 guests so you can get all the family and friends involved for your ceremony then probably under 150 for evening. Evening includes the day time people so with 150 would give you an extra 70 people. We have around 85 (including us) for the day and 120 for the evening.
Once you have your estimate numbers price up the venues you have looked at and find an overall estimate for what you are willing to spend on a venue.
Next its time to do something similar with the rest of your list, have a look at the leaflets you picked up and think how much you want to spend on each item on your list. I know this sounds a bit long winded and not very fun but it will help you a lot in the long run. You now have a guide to go off when speaking to vendors and you also have the starts of your To Do List. From here you can either jump straight into the fun stuff or speak with your family so see if they have any ideas about your budget.
Before jumping in though be aware you need to keep track of what you are actually spending in comparison with your budget, you might think something is a great deal but in the long run it might not be, so stick to your budget as much as you can and do your research.
If you are jumping into the fun stuff like I did then there are several places you can go from here and a lot of them can be done at the same time. For me I started doing more research on my venues, thought of a rough date, picked a colour scheme and started thinking of the guest list. The first two I will cover in the next post. As for the other two the colour scheme is important as you don't want to clash with your venue and guest list well... This is where families start to get involved so its a good idea to have a think on your own before you start getting told who you NEED to invite.
COLOUR SCHEME
Have fun and embrace the internet. I found google really useful just typed in X colour wedding ideas then looked at the pictures that came up. This way your not just looking at one element in a colour but pages of different ones.
I am super organised when it comes to events so once I picked my colour I decided to make a sort of mood board of the images I have seen so I could show people instead of just saying the colour. Here is my mood board for our lime green wedding:
I love how bright and fresh this green is and all the different ways people have decided to use it.
Another really good site to start using at this point is Pinterest! it is a wealth of ideas and you can pin them all to a wedding board to look at later or show who ever is helping you.
You will see as I do more of these posts I am a bit fan of keeping things organised and putting my ideas down into different documents which might not be your style but believe me its a good idea, planning a wedding is a big job and you will want all the help you can get.
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