Engaged to Wedding in 5 Months
Photo by Candace Clark Photography
I got into the nitty gritty of wedding event planning again this year, as I helped out on the Olivo wedding, so I thought it about time that I write a bit about the things that helped me as I was planning my own wedding. We had five months to plan the wedding from engagement to the day of the wedding, so organization was key!
I'm a pretty hands-on type of person when it comes to event planning and putting together our wedding was no different. While I was ready to accept the day, however it may turn out, I did my damnedest leading up to the wedding to make it everything we wanted it to be. For me, that meant vision boards, to-do lists, spreadsheets, and many, many phone calls and emails leading up to the wedding.
Photo by Candace Clark Photography
BRAINSTORMING with purpose
We organized all of our ideas for the wedding into separate (private) boards on Pinterest:
- invitations/calligraphy/signs/guestbook
- cake designs
- attire/hair
- table settings/colors & theme/florals/greenery
- everything else that we wanted to keep track of: photo requests/vendors/tips & tricks
Once we were done collecting ideas, we deleted items until we saw a clear vision for the day. Having our ideas categorized into multiple boards allowed us to share what was most important for each of our vendors (graphic designer, baker, venue point-person, florist).
Once the wedding was over, I reduced these down to a single board and made it public, so you can view some of our ideas HERE.
STAYING ORGANIZED
I found many different timelines online that included different details, but none seemed comprehensive to what we needed, nor did they fit into our timeline. With this in mind, I wrote everything out into a Master Wedding Planner. I wrote out our vows, invitation language, and music playlist on our working copy, and inserted links to our other spreadsheets.
The most helpful thing to the planning of our wedding was A Practical Wedding's free Wedding Spreadsheets. In addition to their provided worksheets, we used our own budget spreadsheet & photographer timeline. The budget spreadsheet is concise and to the point, while the photographer timeline is incredibly detailed due to the timing of our event.
SHORT TIMELINE PITFALLS
Reality check! Some things are just harder when it comes to a short timeline for a big event. Vendors are more difficult to book, as are venues, and custom order wedding dresses TAKE TIME!
A couple of our vendors fell through, but we made some changes and our graphic designer stepped up to accommodate the loss. In order to book the venue we wanted, we asked for available dates and then talked to family to find out which would work for most people. Both of these issues were minimally stressful for us, but the wedding dress was not.
One month after the proposal in May was when we decided to have a 2015 wedding, so I went out to shop for the dress. It took only three days to find it, but we had to wait four months for it to arrive. Yup, the dress arrived two weeks prior to the wedding. I took it straight to alterations, where the rush was refused despite the heads up upon ordering it, so it wasn't ready until two days before the wedding. The wait was awful and I had to accept it in whatever state it was in post-alterations, but again, we were lucky. It worked out. This is something, however, I would have avoided if I had truly realized the risk.
over-COMMUNICATING
The final and biggest piece of advice I have is that when you ask outside planners for help, be clear, ask questions, and don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. I try to remember that I am my own best advocate, so I kept a running tally of every request I made and everything that was promised by each vendor, so I could check in with them periodically, by email and phone. Everyone we worked with was amazing, but I had to stay on top of our wedding coordinator, since she was handling many weddings at once.
LET IT GO!
If you don’t have the time to followup on every item you’ve entrusted to others, or if you’re prepared for surprises along the way, just focus on the bottomline and make sure everyone’s running on budget. And once the day arrives, in whatever form it may come, entrust the plans to someone else, let go of the details, and get a jump on that wedded bliss!
