OKAY I ADMIT IT. I have been majorly slacking with my Wedding Diaries blogs. There are a lot of good reasons, but the most important one is that I’ve wanted to keep a lot of the elements of our wedding a surprise. 🙂
We are currently 12 days away from the big day, and I probably should be in freak out mode. Trust me, give Normal Jessica more than 5 items on a to-do list and I am a big bundle of stress. But from the beginning of my wedding planning process I have aimed to be as organized and intentional with my time as possible. Now I want to share a few of my secrets 🙂 Let’s call this…
Tips to Be A Relaxed Bride
1. Use this amazing wedding planning checklist. I, along with most people reading this, am planning a wedding for the first time, so of course I needed some help in the “where do I even start” department. This list has kept me on track with knowing what to do starting 6 months before the wedding. Its a God send!
2. One major tip: book your vendors sooner rather than later. Mostly because popular vendors can book up to a year in advance, but also if your budget is something to consider you can work out a payment plan AND it gives you plenty of time to work out kinks in your contracts.
3. An epic seating chart! (Only a true nerd would call this epic, right?) But thanks to F.R.I.E.N.D.S., I knew the best way to make the process quick, easy, and -dare I say it- fun! My first step was using the most amazing website called www.AllSeated.com to visualize my floor plans. (If you’re more of a digital person, you can do the entire process of layouts and seat assignments here- amazing!) I then bought a poster board, toothpicks, and flag post-its from the Dollar Store, drew the reception space and tables to scale, and viola! Head over to my Instagram to see the finished product!
4. Make a timeline early, edit it often. This is something I’ve learned from making wedding timelines for the majority of my brides. I base every one off of this sample 8-hour Wedding Day Timeline. Now my personal one is about 4 pages and includes every hour of our wedding weekend from Friday to Monday… but even just having a basic idea of when the vendors arrive and your ceremony start time helps immensely!
5. Start a Honeymoon Fund early. Money will be flying out of your hands throughout the wedding process and you will wonder where it all went. It can be hard to set aside $20 once you’ve paid a $x,xxx check to the caterer. We started our fund the day after we got engaged (#priorities) and have been slowly adding pocket change for the past 8 months. We also registered at the amazing Zola.com where our guests can gift us funds instead of a traditional gift. (P.s. if you use that link to sign up for your registry you’ll receive $20!) When we leave for our honeymoon, we will be soooo thankful we did this.
I hope those little tips will help. To be completely honest, I am good at organizing my own time but awful at delegating. I am lucky enough to work from home and therefore can dedicate a larger amount of time to wedding planning than Sam. For normal 9-5 fiancés I would recommend making a list of His and Her tasks… So far I have only given Sam a few jobs (DJ tasks, groomsmen gifts and attire, planning the activities the day before the wedding, and choosing a surprise first dance song). If I could rewind a few months I would have at least tried to delegate more. 🙂
More to come in the next 12 days…
thank you for this, i can use all the advice i can get (especially from someone young, doing it now vs. my grandma). i had totally forgot about zola and had been researching universal registries, so thank you for the reminder!