My Rockin' Wedding Plans: 7 Months To Go

I've bought a dress, booked a band, and literally have a shed full of prosecco.  What more do you really need for a wedding?!

I'm not going to go into too much detail of my plans on this blog in advance of the wedding, because friends and family do read it and I would like to maintain some degree of surprise for them.  I do intend to do a thorough report after the day though of everything we did, including costs, because one thing that I found frustrating from reading 'real bride budgets' was that they were very vague, omitting crucial details such as number of guests!  It would sound wonderful that they'd done a lavish wedding for £1,000 and then you'd find out that they only had 10 guests.

Here's a quick run through of where we've got to with the planning, and I've tried to state what I'm doing and what the groom is doing, because we're very much doing this together.

Venues
Ceremony and reception venues are booked.  I've also booked my hotel for the night before the wedding, which is 5 minutes away from the ceremony venue (just in case - best to be close I thought, in case there are any transport dramas!).  We are very lucky in that the registry office is located in a wonderfully grand building, which you might not believe is cheaper than getting married in the function room of some hotel!  Yes, you read that correctly.  Before that, the registry office used to be located in a mediocre brick building that's now a Subway.

For the reception we have hired a Grade II listed church hall.  It's small enough to feel intimate but large enough to pack in a lot of people, and comes complete with a stage, so it will be perfect for the musical entertainment we have planned.

Bride and groom's outfits

I've got a dress, he's got a suit.  I don't have any shoes yet, or accessories, but I'm working on that, and I will need to get the dress hemmed as it's super long, even on my tall frame.  Yes, it's LONG!  Ha!  How many of you thought that I would go for a '50s tea length one?  I will be doing my own hair and makeup, so I will need to set time aside to practice over the upcoming months.

Photographer

We are very, very excited about our photographer.  It's sort of a secret for now, but I will tell you more in a separate post!.

Guests

We've made an epic list, but haven't set the invites out yet.  We didn't do a big announcement, it's not on social media, and we didn't do that American thing of having an "engagement shoot".  I told all of my friends individually so that they could get the date in their diaries, but I don't think that my husband-to-be has done that (so if any of his friends are reading this now - surprise!  We're getting married!!).  My husband-to-be is in full charge of the invitations, he has some creative plans, so I might help out with the wording and check he's got the date and time on it, but other than that will leave him to it.  I've started one of those wedding websites too so that we can direct guests to that for all the travel and accommodation details.

Catering

Our church hall reception has no kitchen facilities, so we will have to get outside caterers in (tips for South Wales caterers gladly accepted!).  We'll be putting on a bar ourselves though, so will be obtaining a licence, stocking it ourselves, hiring glasses and bar staff (another area the groom-to-be is in charge of).  There is a LOT to think about when you're arranging all of this yourselves rather than have a venue take care of it for you, but we wanted to make the bar affordable for both ourselves and our guests.  Weddings are expensive enough for people to attend, without having to pay hotel prices at the bar.

Entertainment

The groom is a musician, so we have a large circle of musician friends, and this is another area that he is completely in charge of.  He's booked a band, is trying to get a DJ, and no doubt there will be other contributors to the entertainment, including the groom himself of course!

Wedding Cake

We were going to make a cake ourselves, because if you've ever made a Christmas cake, it's really not that hard to do a basic fruit cake and wack some white icing on it.  But then one of my sisters kindly offered to get us a cake as a wedding present, as her neighbour apparently makes to-die-for cakes, so we decided to take her up on it.

Bridesmaids

Because we have large families, I am having 5 bridesmaids and 2 flower girls on the day.  I know this must seem excessive, but we both have nieces that we want to be part of the day so we could never have chosen between them.  The bridesmaid dresses have been purchased, and they're all on the hunt for accessories.  I'll wait a while to get the flowergirl dresses as they are both small children and will probably grow taller over the next few months.

Flowers

I've asked my Dad to start growing some!  I'm not sure whether we'll end up using these to decorate the venue or if they will contribute to a bridal bouquet, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  I've also started drying vast quantities of petals to make confetti with.  I just use up the flowers from the garden, or if I am lucky enough to get a bunch of cut flowers as a present then the petals from that get dried too.  It's really easy and I've already obtained quite a pile of petals.

Rose petals dry well to make petal confetti

Decorations
I've had so many kind offers from friends and family to help us decorate the reception venue the day before the wedding.  A colleague has offered to lend me some decorations, and as for the rest, we have an impressive selection already at home (from years of being magpies), and continue to pick up bits as we see them.  Just last week I picked up a wooden sign for 40p, when I know they retail for at least a fiver!  There's also a trend for vintage suitcases, rustic logs and that kind of thing, which you can hire for around £30 a piece - whereas we get them for free out of skips...

Bargain wooden block decorations from the charity shop, £1!

There are other things that are further down the list, like wedding rings, transport and a hotel for our wedding night.  And small but irksome things, like the need to find 15 white tablecloths...

I have to say that when writing this post I had a slight panic, because I thought that the wedding being in September would make it 9 months away, but then I worked out that it's only 7 months away, which gave me a few flutters.

So much to do, so little time to be a bridezilla.