5 Things I Have Learnt About Planning a Wedding

With only 5 weeks until my fiancé and I tie the knot. Things have been stressful. Who knew that wedding planning was such a big task, right? For me it was supposed to be straight forward. Venue, Caterer, Music, Dress and Voila. Wedding Planned and Done! Or so I thought.

I didn’t anticipate how stressful and massive wedding planning can be. Not to mention that my fiancé and I had decided to do every major life milestone all at the same time!  Engaged, bought a house and then had a baby all within a year! Yikes Check out my 5 tips for new mums here. We did everything backwards.

So as we are tying up some of our loose ends and finalising our big day I thought I would put together some of the things I have learnt during my wedding journey to help all future brides to be prepare and tame the Bridezilla within.

1. The Early Bird gets the worm

I swear that this saying was invented just for weddings. I was amazed at how early in advance we needed to book things. And not just the big things like venue and caterer. EVERYTHING! Lee and I got engaged in July 2015 and had decided that we would plan for the wedding to be exactly two years from that date.

I had my heart set on 7th July 2017. Seven seems to be our lucky number and I desperately wanted that date.  So we went to visit venues a few months later only to be told that it was already booked. We had to change the date

Starting to panic, I started contacting other services that we had wanted such at decorators, bands, even hair and makeup artists. And guess what? They were all booked out! So if you know what you want then save yourself the stress and start booking as soon as he pops the question.

2. Shop Around

As soon as you mention the word Wedding, prices seem to go up three fold. It is ridiculous. Lee and I were looking to get confetti. Nothing fancy just plain old biodegradable confetti so that we can get a nice photo of us coming out of the church with our guests throwing confetti. Simple right? Nope we were looking at a minimum of 60£, and that is for only half of our guests.

This is were you need to be patient and spend a lot of time shopping around to make sure you are getting the best price and not getting duped!  Most of my time has been spent researching and researching the most cost effective way to do things. Even though it takes time, I have been able to find great bargains and alternatives.

 

3. Prepare, Prepare …PREPARE!!!!!!

In order to be as stress free as possible while wedding planning, you need to be as organised as possible. Luckily both my partner and I are fairly organised, we love checklists in our house. At the beginning as you start to book all of the main things for your big day. You will feel this false sense of security that you have everything under control. Chances are you don’t. I went months thinking everything was dandy. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realised we had no seating for people during the 2 hour wait before dinner. It was a mad dash to find a solution. On top of that you need to think about all of the finer decoration details with in my opinion is the most stressful. I wish we could have a trial day just so I could make sure everything perfect.

4. You cannot do Everything, and that is ok.

No matter how well you have planned your big day, there will always be a moment when you feel you haven’t done enough. We have visited our venue on a few occasions just to keep the image fresh in our minds and to visualise our ideas better. However now that wedding season is upon us, we have arrived to see the remnants of other weddings at our venue. What an amazing way to make you feel like you haven’t done enough and that your wedding is going to be shit is comparison. PANIC!

There are always going to be things that you can add on to your wedding to lake things look nicer. But lets be real, are those things really important? Decide what is really important for you and your partner to have on your big day and then focus on that. If you can live without the light canapé, then scrap it. But if you absolutely want the Photo Booth, the go for it. It is knowing that you have limits and accepting that.

5. Remember this is YOUR day

Weddings can sometimes bring the best and the worst out of people. It can be easy to get carried away and feel like you need to compromise and please everyone else. However never to the detriment of your own happiness. At the end of the day, this is your day. It is about you and your partner, and you have the right to have the day you want and dream of. After all you only get one day in your life time.

Having said that if there are things that you can change to avoid unnecessary drama, without impacting too much on your day then I encourage you to make the sacrifice. Somethings are not worth having a lifetime of resentment for all because you put someone on the wrong table and couldn’t be bothered changing it.

I hope these 5 things helps you in your magical journey. We cannot believe that our journey is almost at its end.  I am going to try to cherish every moment from here up until our big day and you should too.

 

xxx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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