1 Year Engaged | A&C Wedding Planning
As I get older, it seems that time just keeps going faster. I can't believe it's been over a year since we got engaged. So much in our life has changed - we bought our apartment building, we got a new pup, we've traveled, and another wedding season has come and gone.
When sharing the realness of wedding planning over on my Instagram a few of you requested more wedding planning blog posts. So today I thought I would share a follow up since my last post, 6 Months Engaged | A&C Wedding Planning.
To be honest, when writing that last post we were feeling super overwhelmed and stressed by the amount of time, energy, and money wedding planning is! As I'm sure many of you feel the same throughout the process of planning. But I will tell you - it get's better! And more FUN.
Now that a lot of our big things are booked & planned, we can start to relax a little bit and enjoy planning all the small personal details that will really help make our day resemble who we are as a couple and the wedding weekend we want to have.
So I thought I would share a few things we have tackled since the last time I wrote.
All major vendors are booked! Because we had a long engagement, we had the luxury of picking and choosing what items of wedding planning we wanted to work on, and when. So we decided to book a lot of our vendors based on priority to us. Obviously booking a venue & creating a guest list should be first on your list - but after that we started working on booking planner, photographer, videographer, florist, officiant, lighting, catering etc.
Tip: Even though booking based on priority worked for us - I definitely recommend inquiring with the more expensive vendors in the early stages of planning such as catering & rentals. They likely will take up large parts of your budget and getting an idea of cost early on is important to your overall budget even if they might not be the most important aspect of your day.
Engagement Photos! I'm lucky enough to have a maid of honor who is a photographer so we were able to shoot some beautiful Maine engagement photos (pictured here) - thank you Mackenzie Lamoureux Photography! But we are actually flying out to Arizona next week to meet our wedding photographer and do some more engagement photos out there. We can't wait to share them with you!
My dress is ordered & Cole's suit is in! We even narrowed down the attire for our wedding party.
Save the Dates! This is when shit got real for us. This week we mailed out our save the dates. Which honestly is a little early considering our wedding is in June but so many of our guests were asking us about them and about making reservations for accommodations so we thought the earlier the better! I actually took on the task of designing our own invitation suite (call me crazy). But with a little graphic design knowledge and very particular taste, I knew I could create what we wanted and eliminate a big expense for us. I used Cards & Pockets to print our designs. But if you're looking to work with an already made template I suggest checking out websites like Minted.com or BasicInvite.com.
Before sending our Save The Dates - I wanted to complete our wedding website to include more details for guests. These little details are the fun part for me so I enjoyed creating our wedding website with the website builder Wix.com (where I created my photography website & more). You can check it out at LifeWithTheLibbys.com.
Registry! This one is still a work in progress but something that we definitely started thinking about. We opted to use Zola.com & Amazon.com for our registry needs.
A few small things that might sneak off your to-do list is reserving a room block for traveling guests & booking transportation. I thought I was way ahead of the game on a lot of the planning aspects but when I called one of the hotels near our venue they already had a room block for our wedding weekend so they had less availability. So let this serve as a reminder it's never too early! We also included this information on our wedding website so guests could make reservations when they were ready. We also made an airbnb favorites list to share with guests. A lot of people, or large groups, prefer to stay together in a large home vs. multiple hotel rooms. So we put together a list of big & small airbnbs that are in close proximity to our venue. We also decided to book transportation to shuttle guests from their hotel to the wedding venue. Although only a short distance, the area we're getting married in does not offer many cab or uber services. So we wanted to eliminate that stress for our guests and provide this peace of mind for them!
We booked our bachelorette & bachelor parties! This is the fun stuff. The girls are headed to Miami for a long weekend while the guys are headed to Nashville. Stay tuned for more fun details.
Now that a lot of the big stuff is booked & done, we're honestly taking a bit of a break from wedding planning and just catching up on wedding season for my business.
But I'm so excited to dig into the fun details of designing tablescapes & welcome bags! All the fun little details that truly make a wedding unique. I know we're going to have so much fun with our amazing team of vendors bringing our vision to life.
A lot of you requested more specific wedding planning tips like wedding venues & vendors I recommend. I'll make sure to keep this in mind and put together more content posts in the future!
If you have any specific questions, please don't hesitate to reach out! It's so fun to go along this wedding planning journey with all of my clients and friends, I'd love to help any way that I can.
