Reflections on Organizing a Wedding

Now that my wife and I have gotten married, we get a lot of questions from other couples about what vendors we used, what to look out for when planning, and what we would have done differently. So, we wanted to write down our thoughts on the experience.

Since there’s a lot to think about when it comes to planning a wedding, especially when you don’t have a wedding planner, we wanted to highlight a few things that we thought were important.

We split these into 3 parts:

Things that Worked

Stay Organized!

First, the main thing we did right is being ridiculously organized and keeping a detailed, running to-do list/timeline.

Early on after we got engaged, we researched different timelines of when to do different tasks. For example, you should buy the wedding dress 8-10 months ahead of the wedding. So, this is one of the first things we did.

After comparing all the lists, we made our own calendar with what major tasks we had to do each month leading up to the wedding.

We noticed that there was a lull about 5 months out from the wedding, when you’re done booking the major vendors and have sent out the save the date. Then, there was another lull in planning about 2 months before, after you’ve sent the invitations, finished choosing all the finer details, and planned in great detail every minute of your life for the final month.

Enjoy these lulls!

Looking at a lot of lists helped us build a really good plan and feel secure that we didn’t forget anything important. This was important to ensure we didn’t work too much, because we knew that we were getting what we needed to do done on time.

Similarly, being super organized is even more critical as the wedding gets closer. One extra thing we did the month before the wedding was make an itinerary for each person in the wedding party: the bride, groom, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and parents.

This made it clear for each person where they were supposed to be, what they needed to bring, and what their job was during each part of the rehearsal and wedding. We also included the addresses and phone numbers everyone needed to know.

While doing this, we realized there were a lot of details left to figure out! Between hair and makeup, the church, the reception, the after party, and where everyone is sleeping, it was a bit of a puzzle figuring out where everyone’s cars needed to be.

To kickstart your process, I’ve included a sample of rough calendar and the wedding timeline we gave out to the wedding party.

Shopping Around for Vendors

Wedding vendors are famously expensive. They markup the prices for a wedding versus any other kind of event.

One reason I think this happens is weddings are often more involved. The bride and groom have exacting expectations and extra requests that make things more complex for vendors.

Shopping around for these vendors helped us save a huge amount of money. And, we were still able to get exactly what we wanted.

For example, we were initially quoted over USD10,000 by several vendors for photography/videography. Instead, we looked for more local photographers, who were often doing it as a side gig, instead of a large company. This let us save around USD7,000, while still getting what we wanted.

The experience was similar for the cake, music, flowers, and the wedding dress. By shopping around, we saved 50-75% of the prices we were initially quoted by our reception venue’s “recommended” vendors.

A big reason for this is that we spent more on our venue. So, their recommendations were often for top-quality vendors from New York City. For example, the photographers they recommended were regularly flying out to destination weddings all over the world and doing photoshoots for magazines and other fancy things. And we weren’t looking for that; we just wanted to a good local photographer instead.

Finally, we did a couple of things ourselves, rather than using a vendor. For example, we bought the alcohol ourselves. This saved between USD2,000 and USD4,000 compared to an alcohol service that delivers.

We also bought an Etsy template for our wedding invitations, which worked amazing. The package also included templates for the menu, seating chart, welcome sign, gift table, and many other things. So, everything looked great and really well put together, because it was consistently the same style.

After making all of the tweaks we needed, we printed the invitations and other material using a discount, online printing website (PrintKeg). And, we ordered a few other last minute things from CVS, Staples, and WalMart. But between all this, we saved about half the cost again!

So to conclude, we’d recommend being conscious about what you want to splurge on and where you can save money by shopping around. For us, we splurged on the venue and saved on basically everything else. All told, we spent about USD5,000 extra on the venue, but we saved about USD20,000 on everything else. So yeah, pretty nice.

Other Things that Worked

Organization and shopping around were the two big things. But there are an assortment of smaller things that worked really nice.

Having a private wedding website. We are both fairly private people. So, knowing that the details of our wedding were only accessible to people that we invited was nice. For this, I built a custom website. But, some wedding website providers like TheKnot, SquareSpace, and others support this feature.

Using Amazon Registry. There were a few features that were nicely thought out. They include gift receipts for everything by default. They support delivering the gifts to an address of your choice without revealing that address. And they kept track of who bought what so that you can write out thank you’s after.

Taking off the week before the wedding. We finished the last major todo’s like 2 weeks before the wedding. So we were fairly relaxed, which was amazing. But, I was able to take the week before of the wedding off. And that was one of the best choices I made during the entire experience, because I stayed nice and chill and was able to do any little things that came up.

You really do need someone available (ideal more than one) to move things around to wherever they are supposed to be in the day or two before the wedding.

Not Having a Big Bachelorette/Bachelor Party. This is a pure personal preference. Nothing against anyone who wants to go on a big trip to Vegas or have a beach getaway. But for us, it was nice just to hang out casually with friends. And, it took a load off our our wedding party.

Create a reminder for time-sensitive things after the wedding. Some things have to be done in the short period of time after the wedding. Try to think of these and make a reminder for yourself. One thing we missed was changing my wife’s insurance to my plan. You only have 30 days from the wedding date to do this and we forgot.

Keeping a regular date night & not talking about the wedding during it. This is tough to actually do. But it was nice to have at least one night a week to take a break and just do something fun.

Not Using a Wedding Planner. Our reception venue had a planner that did anything related to the reception. She helped us with the seating chart, linens, and decorations. And, her staff helped with setup and packing up at the end of the night, including things we brought in. Similarly, the bar staff unboxed the alcohol after I dropped it off and packed it up after.

This was the main thing that we wanted. And since we are very organized, we didn’t hire another planner to handle other vendors and managing things day-of. That turned out like a great decision.

However, we would recommend hiring some staff if your reception venue doesn’t help with cleaning up. At the end of the night, you’re tired and having people to do this is amazing. You can just leave and know everything will get where it needs to be. Some wedding planners offer a “day-of-only” package just for this.

Special Things we Enjoyed Doing

There are a lot of traditions at weddings. But it’s also your day as a couple to do what you want and express yourselves.

There were some conventional things we just skipped, like the bouquet toss, removing/tossing the garter, wedding cake, and something old/new/borrowed/blue.

But there were other things that we were so excited about and were uniquely “us”.

First, we made a very detailed program for our wedding ceremony. As practicing Catholics getting married sacramentally in the church, we knew that our nuptial mass would be very different from what many of our guests are used to.

So we many an extremely detailed program with all the music, readings, and parts of the mass. That way people could follow along and know when to stand, sit, kneel, and sing.

My wife did almost all of it. But, I made a nice cartoon map of the church grounds, which the guests had an opportunity to explore after the ceremony.

And second, we made a bunch of games! Even before the wedding, I made a “how well do you know the couple” trivia game on our wedding website. But, that game was way way too hard. The average was 50%, lol (sorry again everyone, haha).

But then at the wedding, we made even more games. Since our reception was at a local art museum, we made a “scavenger hunt” for our guests to explore the museum. We made 6 riddles that hinted at a painting or sculpture in the museum.

And our last game was the “shoe game”, where the bride and groom sit back to back and answer questions about each other like Who is more patient? or Who is a better cook?. And they raise the shoe of the bride or groom.

And for each of these games, we announced the winner at different times during the ceremony and gave out prizes. It was a ton of fun!

There were other smaller things too. We stole an idea from one of our friends weddings, where they had polaroid-style cameras for guests to add a photo and message to a guest book. And we made a photo backdrop out of a cheap balloon arch off of Etsy (USD30 total vs like USD1-2k for fancy flower or turf backgrounds).

Obviously your special thing will be different than ours, but we totally recommend thinking of different things to make the day special for you!

Things That We’d Do Differently

Finally, there’s some things that were a mistake in retrospect.

The main one is pretty common. So we should have seen that coming. But, spend less on flowers.

You can make centerpieces from a candle and a couple of trinkets and save like USD2,000 while still having it look nice.

Another one is spending less on the honeymoon, and honeymooning inside the United States. We spend about 50% too much on what was ultimately just a beach vacation. It was really really nice though.

Next, we had a low-key engagement party at my house. And that was great. But we had it like a year into our engagement. So, it would have been better to have it much closer to when we actually got engaged.

And lastly, we should have been less picky about the save-the-date. We waited a while because we wanted to get nice pictures taken by a friend of ours and we wanted them printed, rather than digital.

But we really should have sent something sooner. Even just texting people with the date and a simple Canva design would have been good so that they had more than 5 months notice.

Conclusion

Our wedding was a blast. And, because we’re pretty organized, we were able to plan everything out and have the few weeks before the wedding to mostly relax.

We wanted to share out thoughts so that others could learn from our experience!

So to review, the absolute number one thing is being organized. Make a schedule which gets everything done in time, but also balances what is realistically doable each week. Make lists and lists of lists. And, communicate frequently and clearly with your wedding party, vendors, parents, and guests.

I’ll link the sample planning timeline (PDF) and day-of timeline (PDF) again in case you didn’t see them above.

And of course, get in touch with us if you have any questions!

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