Hi!! If you’re new here, Jay and I get married in August – so I’ve been really excited to share a lot of wedding content! I’m wanting to make this a series – so that I can give you any tips for wedding planning if you are a bride to be, or if you’re helping someone plan a wedding…whatever it might be! This blog is obviously done BEFORE the wedding… but I will also post one AFTER to kind of debrief how everything went!
Let’s get into it!!
When to start planning?
So right when you get engaged… what do you do? Do you need a wedding planner, where do I even begin… that was kind of where we were at personally. I have a little bit of regrets of not diving into it right away, and I feel conflicting feelings about that because we also took like probably 3 months to really enjoy our engagement before even thinking about wedding planning…but your options are limited if you wait.
So if you are thinking that you’re about to be engaged, or you did just get engaged, I think it’s a good idea to at least figure out where you guys want to get married, and what time of year you want to get married.
Is a wedding planner worth it?
We have a wedding planner, (here is her insta!!) which I think was a really good decision but it’s not necessary if you are very on your game and organized… I knew personally that Jay is kind of like a, “lets go with the flow” kind… and wanted me to take the reigns, and he’ll give his two cents where it’s needed. BUT – I would say if you think that you’re going to ruin your time by stressing out over the wedding, and you’re not even going to be able to enjoy it, it’s probably worth looking into a wedding planner OR a day-of coordinator on your wedding day.
Because of having a planner, I’ve been able to really soak up the engagement season rather than stressing out too much. I will say, it’s kind of been decision overload and we’ve had to make a lot of decisions lately… the decisions of where the heck we’re having our wedding I think that was our hardest part!
Choosing a Location
How do we even begin wedding planning when we don’t even know where we’re having our wedding!? Jay’s from Florida, I’m from Michigan. We finally decided after looking at some different venues that we were going to do Northern Michigan!
We went there and toured some venues all over Michigan, and absolutely love the one that we chose… I do not have one single complaint. We didn’t know what time of year we were going to do other than summer, and we probably would have chosen June if we could have, but something that you’ll learn throughout the wedding process is that you really have to base it off of what venue you’re going to do, and what they have available… because it was either we get our perfect Saturday June wedding in 2025 (when we did not want to wait until 2025 to get married) OR we get married on a Friday in August. We chose Friday!
Deciding the DAY to get married
There were Sundays available, but I did not really want a Sunday. Jay was kind of like it’s up to you (since he’s very go with the flow) but we really prefer a Friday or a Saturday over a Sunday. Then we can kind of make a long weekend of it, and personally, I would rather take a Friday off than a Monday off… and so for people traveling, they can make a long weekend of it.
I know a lot of people have decided that they’re going to make a whole week out of it because it’s kind of a destination vacation type Vibe, and pretty much actually no one is from northern Michigan that’s going to the wedding. We decided on a Friday because we were going to do a rehearsal dinner on Thursday night, have the wedding on Friday night (it’s an evening wedding), and then on Saturday we’re going to have kind of an optional brunch everyone can hang out at.
Long story short, if you’re NOT doing a wedding planner, decide where you’re going to have your wedding, and figure out which venue you’re going to do in that location, AND THEN figure out the dates.
BUDGETING – what to splurge on
I watched so many YouTube videos of things that people wish they did on their wedding day, and wish that they didn’t do on their wedding day. Most people said they wish they researched ways to save money for the wedding. Since Jay and I are paying for our entire wedding ourselves, from the rehearsal dinner all the way through the wedding and everything in between, that has made it amazing. We can make our decisions without worrying about other people’s opinions, and what we should we include for the sake of our parents. (Not saying that that’s a bad thing at all whatsoever, but a lot of times when you have your parents paying for it, I am imagining it becomes kind of like what THEY want to see happen.)
Also since we are completely paying for it ourselves, we’ve had to make so many decisions on what’s worth splurging on and what we can save a little bit on. For example, we had to do a little pros and cons list and decide what’s worth splurging on. I believe that it’s worth splurging on a very good videographer (our videographer) and photographer. (our photographer!) Jay was all about splurging on food and music, and I totally agree – music makes the entire experience for everyone, so we ended up deciding on a DJ.
We’re also having a trio doing live music during the ceremony and also during the cocktail hour. The DJ’s name is DJ Casey Rusch (here’s his insta!) We didn’t even know how to find a good DJ, and the most important thing that we were told was that they know the venue, and that they also have been recommended to you from other people, and people have gone to weddings that they’ve been djing at. I personally want everyone dancing the entire time, so the music is like a very important part of it.
BUDGETING – what to save on
A few things that we were like, okay… it’s not really worth spending an arm and a leg on was the wedding invitations and our save the dates. That was a hard decision for me. I loved our wedding invites that our wedding planner found, they were from a little independent small business, but they were really expensive… I think they were five times the amount of what we ended up spending on Minted, so we just went with minted ones. I think they’re still gorgeous, I love our save the dates! We haven’t even done our wedding invites quite yet, but our save the dates are very minimal and simple. I did love the idea of having ribbon on each one and very crazy save the dates and invites, but at the end of the day, they’re just save the dates and invites.
The other thing is florals. I had no idea what florals cost, so that was definitely new for me and everything seemed expensive… I’m like for flowers?! for one day?!? We could not wrap our head around that, and we ended up having to say we’re going to go on the very low end of the range for florals. We are still doing real flowers, but we are going to have it where they’re bringing some of the flowers from our ceremony and bringing them into the reception to kind of get double use out of them. I can not even imagine them only being out there for 15 minutes of the ceremony.
We’re going to add some candles and some lights and stuff to kind of take away from less florals, and we’re still doing a decent amount because I love the look of them. We’re going for a very neutral minimal look on florals, so we don’t need anything over the top. I will say, that’s probably the biggest shock of wedding planning.
Recommendations
A few different things that I would recommend:
Use postable! This was the best thing to get everyone’s addresses. They can just receive a link from you, they’ll fill out who their plus one, they’ll fill out their address, their email, their phone number, I think you can even have options for like their birthday and stuff. It’s been so nice to even just have all of their addresses as my contacts because I’ve used them for a couple different things – like I wanted to send flowers to someone for their birthday, and I’m like oh! I already have their address because of our wedding invites! I put everything in a spreadsheet afterwards so that we could take all of those addresses to do the save the dates and invites.
We’re doing a wedding website, and we’re going to do that through The Knot. I just started doing it so I really haven’t done a ton with it, but that is in the works right now and that’s pretty much what I’ve been recommended every single time. It seems very cut and dry – it’s easy to do your registry through, right now it has a countdown to tell us when we’re getting married and how many days are left!
Minted, like I said, we’re using for our wedding save the dates and our wedding invites, but also you can do different things like I think we might do some “day of” signage and stuff like that.
I would recommend doing a wedding email. We have a wedding email address that we use, it’s like Jay and I’s combined email – and we use it only for wedding stuff. Everything from our honeymoon, to all of the different things – even when we were just looking for a wedding planner, and for venues, I started using that email. That was something I heard in one of the YouTube videos that people recommend, because there is so much that goes into it, and you are coordinating with so many different vendors that it can get lost easily.
Mindset
You want to have fun with this. I think that’s the biggest thing – during wedding planning, it can be so overwhelming if you let it be, but just try and remember that this is such an important and exciting day for you too. Everything will work themselves out, as long as you have your Venue, you have the music… Everything might not be perfect, but at the end of the day, it’s a day to celebrate y’all’s love. I’m trying to remember that through the wedding planning because up until like 6 months before our wedding, we were engaged for about 7 months at this point – I really had not been that stressed, and then it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like “we have so many things that we need to get done!!” and I just can get really overwhelming.
Bridal Party
Let’s chat about bridal party and also who you invite so for bridal party! it’s really hard to choose out of your friends and your family who you’re going to have standing up next to you. We actually dabbled in the idea of not having any bridesmaids and groomsmen, just because it’s a hard decision, and we have a lot of people that we would love to have up there. I ended up going with six bridesmaids, and Jay has eight groomsmen – so we were a little bit worried about having different numbers, but it’s going to be totally fine. If there are people that you are super close with that have been in your life for a long time, and you want to have them in your wedding party… I say have them. It’s going to be a big decision for the person that’s going to be in your wedding, because it’s expensive! It’s time consuming being in the wedding, so don’t be offended if someone’s like I just can’t take that on… but also don’t feel like you have to include someone because they’re a friend of a friend. It’s probably going to hurt some feelings, there are definitely people that I care so deeply about and I consider a really close friend that I’m not having in my wedding but I’m including them in The Bachelorette trip or in the bridal showers.
[I’ll make a whole post about everything purchased for different events for the wedding, but here’s a few things I’ve been loving!]
Guest List
We are having 150 people total on the guest list. That’s around how many we’re inviting – so it’s probably going to be more like what 120 130 people I’m guessing, give or take. I don’t really know exactly how many people tend to say no for a destination wedding… that’s going to be the the kicker. That’s including plus one, so when you actually think about that, it goes quickly! Like I think we probably could have done a lot more than that, and included some other people, but we had to be kind of picky with who we chose. We have a venue that only holds 175 people total, so that’s going to be including our wedding planners and makeup artists and photographer and all that, so that goes way quicker than what we expected.
We’re having to not invite people that we might have thought we would invited, but if you haven’t talked to them them in a long time or you don’t know the other person, like if Jay does not know them well and I don’t know his people well, and he’s like I haven’t talked to them in a long time or I’m like I haven’t talked to them in a long time… or we don’t reach out to each other, that’s a hard decision, but at the same time you – cannot invite everyone. You can’t include everyone, so the people pleaser in me had to make some hard decisions.
Decisions you might not think about
Do we want to do a buffet style, or do we want to do plated dinner? It seems like such a small thing, but we decided on a plate dinner. We really want this to feel like an experience, and that kind of just elevates it a little bit. The price difference with who we went through catering – it was not a crazy difference to kind of upgrade a little bit and do a plated dinner rather than just having like a line buffet style.
I have celiac disease, and so does one of my bridesmaids, so I realize that it’s very hard to accommodate everyone. Think about how how many people have food allergies how many people have food preferences, and that’s kind of been the stressful part with a plate dinner… so we’re still trying to figure out the logistics.
I was going to include in here some different things that I’ve gotten recently for my Bridal era!! Like different dresses that I’ve gotten, or different gifts that I’ve gotten for my bridesmaids and whatnot, I can go into more depth on that. I did bridesmaids proposals for each girl and I loved how that turned out – I’m super happy with that.
Another thing that we have coming is that we’re doing flower grandmas instead of flower girls! We had to make the decision, do we want kids or at wedding… we ended up deciding that we’re going to do adults only. It’s a nighttime wedding, and midnight is kind of a late one… Also, that would probably double our guest list if we included kids and having it be a plated dinner, it just is a lot going on having kids, and so we are going to offer some different recommended babysitters there! We haven’t figured out exactly what we want to do for child care. That’s another thing that you kind of just have to be aware that you’re probably going to upset some people.
I’ve Loved sharing throughout this blog, and I hope this is helpful even in the slightest if you are a bride bride to be, or you think you might be a bride here soon!!! It’s such an exciting special time, and I’m loving it. I don’t want it to end, but I am excited to get married. I love you all so much, thank you so much for being here, and I’ll see you guys later!
Xoxo, Sydney
