so, its time to plan your wedding

Myself & my Fiancé Samuel have been engaged now for a little over a year and a half, some may think this is quite a while, some may be thinking its way too soon to start planning a wedding, but hey were doing it and we have a little over a year left until the big day!

Once you have been engaged for a while the fuzzy warm feeling soon passes and the realisation that you have A LOT to plan, make, organise, do etc becomes very overwhelming and you may catch yourself in a huge ball of WTF, so before you find yourself drowning in taffetta and confetti, grab yourself a cup of tea, glass of wine, maybe even grab the bottle and have a read through my advice & tips for brides to be.. 

Theme

This might not seem like the obvious choice for where to begin your planning but it can actually help more so than you think!

We wanted a 'rustic barn theme' so that whittled a lot of potential venues down and made the start of planning a whole lot easier once we had decided a theme!

There are a lot of different choices and styles for wedding themes, personally we kept our choice true to our personalities, but if you are struggling for ideas, Pinterest is the best place for a whole ton of theme inspo! 

Venue

You've chosen your theme, this is where the fun happens and you can finally go and visit your potential venues!

We settled on the first and only venue we saw purely because it just felt right, but you may be a very indecisive person and struggle with choosing the 'perfect' venue, have a look at local venues to you, fitting within your theme: i.e 'rustic barn weddings in Kent'..

I suggest whittling the list down to your favourite 3-5 venues and view those only to begin with, just to not over complicate things.

Liase as much as you can with the wedding planners that are dedicated to those venues and search for someone who is helpful, yet assertive as you know she/he will get shit done on your big day! 

How you gonna do it?

Now this relates purely to how you are as a person, are you someone who loves being crafty? 

Are you a super organised person who has to have every single things absolutely perfect and wont have it any other way? 

Maybe you're super relaxed, yet know what you want and will happily hand everything over to a wedding co-ordinator? 

Having your decision on how your going to go forward with the whole experience is invaluable, personally I have struggled to decide how much control I want over the day, i'm a complete perfectionist & also very crafty, but how much homemade is too much homemade.. 

Budget

This is one of the most important aspects of the entire day, and will also help you decide the last section, do you have an unlimited budget and money is no object when it comes to your big day or are you a budget bride and saving every month to have the wedding of your dreams (yep I'm the latter)!

Sit down with your fiancé and grab a notebook and draft out every single thing you want to be a part of your wedding day and a rough estimate of how much you want to spend on each of those things, total them up and work out if that is an achievable amount for you to spend on the day itself, this is more for the bride who has a budget but it helps either way as it will just set you out for exactly where you need to be savings wise! 

Once you have totalled everything up divide this out over the number of months before your big day (minus the month before as most vendors expect payment upfront around 3-4 weeks before the wedding date) and this will be the amount you need to put aside every month! e.g £5670 ÷ 15 months = £378 per month!

With our estimation's we made them slightly more expensive then we would expect to be paying, therefore allowing us to save extra and then use anything left over to go towards our honeymoon, savings, houses etc etc!

Don't sweat the small stuff

I know this probably sounds so much easier said than done, so I went to Facebook and asked fellow brides and brides to be, the all important question, what advice do you have for us wedding planners?

The feedback I had back was invaluable and the majority of ladies said "not to worry so much over the day at hand & to enjoy it!

Don't worry about others expectations, who to invite (it really is who YOU both want there, not who is expected to be invited), who will and wont sit with who and all the other little niggly things we know and expect that come with wedding planning!

Instead celebrate the enjoyment of the build up, cherish the engagement photos with your partner, have girly evenings with a bottle of wine making table decorations, invites and bouquets, browse pinterest and dream up your perfect wedding day and then take all the inspo you can and turn it into your own take on those beautifully edited photos!

Wedding planning is hard, and hell i'm a long way off of even being close to the finish line yet, but i'm definitely taking as much advice and help along the way I can and I hope that i've helped you in the process too! 

Let me know about your own wedding plans, ideas & what you have in place already, i'd love to hear all about your stories and make some fellow wedding planning friends!