Wedding Planning ... part one

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. 

Making a house a home ...

 .... or in our case making a flat more cosy. Having discovered Pinterest with a vengeance I came across a post that fit very well and had me in giggles. 

You see I just love interior decorating, its what really makes your place feel like a home. So with that being said and after having a good look around on Pinterest I have recently been adding some items to our little nest. 

The first is a really cute little handing owl tea light holder I found in the coffee shop attached to fiancés pt training gym. They have some awesome owl pillows as well but they are a bit out of my price range at the minute. Here is is my new window owl. 

Isn't he just the most adorable thing in the world! I have moved our little silver heart that usually sits in the middle window across so this guy has prie of place. I love how adorable he is, there are some really cute owl motifs around at the minute and I would love a lot of the different items they are on, but at the same time lots of the stuff is fairly useless. So I will stick with my cute little window owl. 

Next up is my new picture wall!! Having seen this done loads of times on Pinterest I decided that I just couldn't wait till we moved to somewhere bigger I wanted one now. 

So we picked up a new frame from Poundstretcher to match our existing ones then I set about arranging pictures and frame placement. I think its looking really good at the minute. The big one and the single frame are new the other two we just moved them around. A couple of the pictures in the giant frame are just place holders until we get some new ones taken and printed out as we haven't been taking as many pictures recently. Hopefully with a wedding coming up we can get a nice pic with either the bride and groom and our other engaged friends or just the friends. You see the fiancé keeps telling me we have too many pictures of just us hehe but I like them because they are all different memories. Guess I will just have to invest in another photo album 

As you can see from the two chairs, this is behind our dinning table which runs parallel to the wall. We used to have the bottom right pic in the centre of this wall and top right on the right hand wall in the middle of the table. That wall is now looking a bit bare so we are going to get another one of those trilogy frames to hang in the same place this one was. This will mean three new landscape pictures to fill which I am sure we can do, but I have found a different idea on Pinterest. 

For valentines last year I made up a google map picture montage of key places in our history as a couple. Its a really cute idea, you take a shot of the google map image on different places that mean something to you, ie first met, first date etc So when I saw this on Pinterest I was intrigued.

I am totally going to do this to see how it looks. If I dont like the map images guess we will just have to find some cute pictures hehe 

xXx

Pictures, Photos and Pinterest.

So as I have mentioned here before I love pictures!! I love taking them, editing them and finding new ones online. There are some amazing pictures out there. 

I am so bad with pictures that I keep confusing the wedding photographers at the fairs hehe see we have already booked our photographer but some of these people have really amazing books for you to look at, and its nice to have a nosey at other peoples weddings see what they did. Plus its nice to get ideas for pics for our wedding. 

Anyhoo tangent aside, as a result of my love of pictures and to try and promote my blog a bit more I decided to take a look at Pinterest. I wasn't overly keen when it first came out, I didn't quite see the point  but after taking a closer look at it and having a bit play yesterday I have embraced yet another social media application.

So if you fancy following my pins here I am: 

Follow Me

Feel free to comment with your username if you are on Pinterest and I will look you up :) 

xXx