Wedding Planning: First Steps

Was it really nearly seven months ago that Jeremy and I got engaged? It simultaneously feels much more recent and much longer ago than that between all the crazy twists and turns 2020 has presented us with! We frequently get asked how wedding planning is going, if we’ve had to majorly change our plans, when and where we’re tying the knot, and so on. I thought I’d start a new series here on the blog so our friends and family can keep up-to-date, and to maybe help inspire anyone else who might also be in the throws of planning a wedding in the coming year or two!

We got engaged in December and seriously started talking about our wedding plans in early January. We have several friends and family members who were engaged in 2019, too, and in looking over our calendars with their wedding dates, already knew it’d be a challenge to plan our big day in 2020 (even pre-COVID). Then, as we started calling and touring venues and considering photographers and caterers, we quickly learned that nearly all of them were booked solid—some through 2022!

We quickly realized that actually getting a venue and a date locked-in was top priority before we could even so much as think about anything else. It’s hard to plan the look and feel of your wedding without a space or time of year in mind!

Just days before Indiana went into lockdown, in early March, we booked a gorgeous space for October 9, 2021. At the time, it felt like ages and ages away, and while we appreciated having the extra time to plan and save for it, felt like it was a distant, untouchable dream.

Now, we couldn’t be more thankful for that extra time. Our hearts are breaking for all of our friends who had weddings planned this spring and fall who have indefinitely postponed their big days, altered them into something entirely different than what they wanted, or are at a complete loss for how to proceed following their venues, caterers, and other vendors going out of business.

Needless to say, planning our own wedding day hasn’t been absolute top-of-mind. Several people have assumed that with all the “extra time” at home, we have figured out every detail. Not the case, at all! We’ve been more focused on making it from one week to the next—financially, physically, mentally. Only just recently have we started talking wedding plans again and actually gaining some momentum, without feeling all over the place.

Planning out the fun little details has always come easy to us, and tends to be what we focus on the most. The music playlist, the beer and cocktails, the wedding favors…that’s the exciting and easy stuff! Those bigger starting points are what we’ve kept putting off and what we’re finally getting around to now.

So, here’s where we’re at and what we’re focusing on nearly fifteen months out.

Embracing Uncertainty & Practicing Flexibility

We’d certainly like to think that by October of 2021, life will have returned, mostly, to normal. Yet, it’s so hard to say what the status of COVID will be by then, not to mention what other crazy disruptors may happen between now and then! We’ve talked a lot about how we need to be willing to pivot quickly, have backup plans, and be willing to make major compromises along the way, depending on what the universe throws at us.

For now, the big piece under this umbrella is knowing that there’s a very real possibility we may need to cut our guest list in half (our first estimates are putting us at just over 200), have a small ceremony on our original date and celebrate later, or even throw our whole initial plan to the wind and elope, just the two of us. We also know that many of the small business vendors we have in mind for food and fun for the day may not survive the hit our economy has taken, and that we need to have several options at the ready.

Fingers crossed that none of this happens, but our number one thought when it comes to our wedding right now is that we need to consistently hope for the best and prepare for the worst!

We’ll be closely watching how weddings change over the coming year—will they be smaller? Will food buffets become a thing of the past? Will venues have new safety measures in place, like less capacity and mask requirements? Not to mention, what will traveling for a honeymoon look like in 2021?

Time will tell!

Budgeting & Saving Money

This is the least-fun part of wedding planning—for me, anyway! Jeremy kind of loves making Excel sheets, crunching numbers, shifting dollars, and coming up with money-saving strategies.

We haven’t gotten down to budgeting the nitty-gritty parts of our wedding just yet, but have started breaking it up into major buckets like: venue and venue needs (tables, chairs, insurance, etc.), food and drink, entertainment, documentation (photography, videography), decor, attire, and so on. Eventually, once we have a more honed-in vision of our wedding day, we’ll break each area down into specifics.

We’ve both started putting away a little money from each paycheck into a savings account (having a set amount automatically pulled and deposited from each paycheck is a great option!), started cutting down on our spending, and attempting to pay down some of our larger debts more aggressively. We’ve also both considered how we can rake in a bit more money over the next year, by selling stuff we no longer use or need, doing a little side-hustling, or picking up temporary, part-time jobs.

In addition, with every new idea that pops up, we carefully consider whether it’s something that we need to hire out or something we can do ourselves. Our wedding will overwhelmingly made up of DIY projects, which we’re hopeful won’t only give it a totally one-of-a-kind vibe, but will save lots of money in the end, too!

The least fun part of all the money-talk is yet to come: stepping back and looking over our finalized list of ideas and determining what is unnecessary—what we can cut and where we can compromise.

Getting on the Same Page & Prioritizing

For the most part, Jeremy and I have been on the same page about our wedding in nearly every regard. We’ve casually talked about it for years, so no real surprises have cropped up from either of us.

Where we do tend to differ, though, is prioritizing each element. While one thing may be at the top of my list in terms of importance, another thing may trump that for Jeremy. We’ve challenged ourselves in the next couple of weeks to write our own lists in the order of importance (photographer, music, food, favors, and so on) we believe each thing falls. Then we’ll sit down and compare lists to see where we match up and talk through where we don’t.

In general, we have both long been in agreement that our top priorities at the end of the day are: we want to have a wedding that’s 100% about us and not checking boxes for other people (in terms of traditional elements); we want our guests to have a blast and feel comfortable enough to linger longer than they’d planned (and not have to worry whether or not they’re having a great time); and we want to be able to step back frequently throughout the day and take it all in (without feeling obligated to play host/hostess, which will be a real challenge for us)!

Creating Timelines & Checklists

Those who know me, know I thrive on list-making! It’s honestly a bit absurd how much I enjoy making lists and crossing off those to-dos. While we know a timeline is subject to shift and change based on so many external factors, our next big step is coming up with a loose one for the year ahead. I’ve bookmarked THIS CHECKLIST from Brides. It’s one of the more detailed and focused I’ve seen. That, coupled with a few other checklists I’ve come across online and the wedding planners my mom got me in the days after our engagement, are going to get more attention than just about anything else in these coming months, I’m sure of it!

We won’t be hiring a wedding planner, so we want to be as thorough as we can in this area, especially in those timelines for the last few months and weeks before the wedding, and of course, the day of!

x x x

We’ve definitely (quickly) learned how stressful wedding planning can be in general, and for those who are trying to plan such a special day in the midst of a global pandemic, we totally get just how impossible it can feel. We want to share our journey through this planning process to offer some transparency, keep our friends and family up-to-date, and maybe provide some ideas or peace of mind to those engaged couples who are in the same boat as we are!

We have a few posts planned already for this series that touch on finding the perfect venue, landing on a theme/direction, tips for staying focused and on-budget, traditions we’ll be keeping and those we won’t, and more.

Feel free to let us know what you’d like to see us share more about as we plan our wedding, and of course, if you have any tips that you’d like to offer us and our readers who may be planning their weddings, please do share away in the comments!

We look forward to sharing more about our wedding planning in the coming months!

xo, Aly

Photo by Lum3n from Pexels.