Happy Wednesday! Actually, happy Wedding Wednesday! 😊 As I go through the process of planning our wedding, I thought it would be fun to share the process with you and any tips I learn along the way. I won’t be sharing a ton of specific details until after the wedding because I’d like to keep some things a surprise, but this series will definitely continue once the wedding is over to give full details, final results, planning regrets/would do differently’s, etc.
We have been engaged for just over 7 months now and our wedding date is exactly a year and 4 months away. That sounds a lot more nerve-wracking when I type it. We are in a weird place between feeling like our wedding is so far away and feeling like we are running out of time.
When we got engaged, the first piece of planning advice that we received that we did not listen to was “don’t get stuck on a date or a month”. But that is exactly what we did. We were hellbent on an October wedding. We both really wanted a fall wedding but didn’t want to get married in either of our birthday months, September & November, so that left October. To top it off, I had a very specific look that I was trying to find. I really wanted a white building with black accents and hardware.
At first, I was absolutely scrambling to find a venue that we loved that had an October 2021 date available for us. I must have messaged over 100 different NC and SC venues on Wedding Wire and even some in Savannah, GA, and California. For some reason, an almost 2-year engagement felt SO long and SO untraditional. I got really caught up in wanting a “traditional” engagement that was only a year-long, but the more venues that I talked to the more I realized that an October 2021 date was not realistic for us. With all of the 2020 weddings that rescheduled to 2021, most venues were already at or nearing capacity for their 2021 schedule. In late December, I finally realized that 2021 was not in the cards for us. Once I made that decision and released us from the strict time constraints of 2021, venue shopping became a lot easier. Venues’ and Vendors’ books were wide open for 2022 and we could basically pick whatever we wanted.
My biggest piece of advice for engaged couples starting to plan their wedding is to decide what your wedding priorities are and then allocate your budget accordingly. For us, the date/venue, the photographer & videographer, and the caterer were the first things that we wanted to book and the places where we were most willing to spend money. The very first thing we booked was the venue so that we could have a firm date and location to tell all the other vendors. After that, we booked a videographer that I found on Instagram and fell in love with, and a photographer that I went to middle school with whose work I’ve followed since she first started her business. A month or so later, we booked a DJ and 2 weeks ago we booked a caterer.
Having a longer engagement has given us the freedom to schedule vendors at a comfortably slow pace. We are really enjoying this season of being engaged and living in our first house, and we didn’t want to spend it feeling rushed or hurried to make decisions and plan our wedding.
*Photo by Andrew May, at Allegory & Elm
Always,
