Planning Our Wedding, part 1

Last year at this time, we were in the thick of wedding-planning.  I've thought for a while about doing a series on wedding-planning, partly to help me remember that busy, happy time, and partly for anyone interested.  Maybe someone else can glean some ideas, or at least benefit from our experience! 

To begin, from the beginning of our engagement, we were sure of a few things.  We would get married in Ballston Lake at the church we both grew up in, by our pastor.  We were hoping for an outdoor reception somewhere, and we wanted to invite everybody.  Even if it meant eating on paper plates, I wanted to serve a full hot meal.  I also wanted to have that meal catered so that all our friends and family could relax and enjoy the day. 

I had lots of visions for details, as well.  Our engagement was 9.5 months long out of practicality; I needed to finish the school year before moving 700 miles away, and John's brother was getting married the same spring, so we needed to put a little space between the weddings.  Though it seemed like a long time at the outset, we needed all those months!   One thing we learned was how helpful it was to have my mom not working during the day at this time.  If we hadn't had someone working on the wedding full-time toward the end, we simply could not have pulled it off.  So, I'd tell a working bride-to-be that she needs someone else helping to plan her wedding full-time.  If there is no one available, she might need to decide to have a simple wedding or to hire a wedding planner, if possible.

At the end of the day, to my disappointment, we couldn't invite quite everyone.  The limiting factor was the size of the sanctuary, so we made rough "A" and "B" lists, hoping that only about 200 of the A list would come, and secretly hoping that we could send out late invitations to the others.

Thanks to living at home for the past couple of years, I'd saved enough of my teacher's salary to give us a decent wedding budget, though John paid for a few things himself and my parents helped us out some, too.  I used a wedding planning budget template for Excel as well as recommendations from theknot.com as a financial guide, and both were helpful.  The knot has a tool which will take your overall budget, the number in your wedding party and the expected number of guests and calculated about how much you should spend on everything. 

Instead of buying a pretty wedding planning book like they sell at Barnes & Noble, my mom and I checked books out of the library and made our own planning binder, using a time line one of the books recommended.  We got a lot of fun ideas from those books, as well, though we didn't use many!  There were ways that we definitely saved money and other ways that we splurged.  I'm looking forward to reminiscing about it all as I share some more in the weeks ahead!