I hope you are enjoying my week of wedding posts and they are giving you a few ideas if you’re also getting married. Yesterday I shared all about the awesome people we hired for our big day. Today I wanted to share with you some tips on planning your wedding.
When we first told people we were getting married in six months time they thought we were a little bit crazy. To organise the whole thing in that time as well as JP being away for 5 months of it and I starting a new job. Needless to say we had to be very organised from the beginning to make it all work. We also needed techniques that meant we could both access all the information and work on things while being thousands of miles apart.
Tips for Planning A Wedding in 6 Months When you Live in Different Countries
Know what you want from the beginning
…or at least what you don’t want. When you’re planning a wedding in 6 months you don’t have time on your side so having some solid ideas is key to making it work. Thankfully as soon as we decided on location we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted from our venue. What’s more we planned to visit our options all in one day to get the ball rolling pretty quickly. Another reason this is so important is because you can’t do much until your venue is booked so you won’t have long to find one!
Set up a Google Doc/Sheet
This was a key one for us especially as we spent about 5 months apart during our wedding planning. We found setting up something online that we could both use, see updates immediately and access from anywhere was really important. We used a Google Sheets template to help us with the initial planning stages (and to check we weren’t missing anything). JP then edited it a lot as we went along so that it worked for us and our needs. The most important thing about using one of these is to make sure it makes sense to both of you. At one point I made changes and JP had no idea what was going on!
Get Ahead Early
When I say we planned a wedding in 6 months thats the time from between deciding on a rough date and getting married. We actually booked pretty much the whole wedding in a month, a lot of the reason for this was because JP was leaving the country but it was also key to making the time scale a success. People book things for wedding years in advance so chances are venues and vendors will already be pretty booked up. This is why it is important to sort the key parts of your day early on. As I’ve mentioned the venue has to be the first thing you do but for us getting our photographer sorted was the second thing on our agenda. As someone who has taken wedding photos before, I knew exactly what I wanted.
Another way you need to get ahead early is with wedding decor, unlike weddings that are booked years out you never really get that lull period where you can do decorations. Due to this it is best to start the decorations early and to get stuff done when you can. You never know how much time you’ll need as you get closer to the date.
Don’t be Specific with the Date
Another thing that you cannot be fussy about is the date especially if you have your heart set on a specific venue. We knew we wanted to get married in the Christmas Holidays and decided any date between Christmas and New Year would work for us. This helped us to firstly save money on our venue as we booked for a Thursday and secondly, meant we could choose our first choice venue because we were happy to be flexible. Originally we’d looked at getting married on New Year’s Eve but it seems that is a really popular day.
Make Decisions Quickly and Together
This kind of follows on from my first point, as well as knowing what you want you also need to make these decisions quickly. Like I’ve said more than once getting the venue sorted is key and something that needs to be done together ideally. You won’t have long to ponder the decisions or you risk your date being booked up.
We also spent a week in rural France planning most of the ‘extras and decor’ for the wedding without any one else around us. This meant we had time to focus on the wedding but also that we made decisions quickly because we didn’t have to listen to the opinion of a handful of others first.
Plan Wedmin to your Skype Chats
When you’re living apart from each other you tend to talk on Skype/Whatsapp a lot but it can be hard to balance everyday life conversations with the admin of planning a wedding. We would try to talk about everyday things in the week and then use a day at the weekend to specifically talk about wedding things. Otherwise one of use would barely be awake for the conversation because of the time difference.
DIY a lot of Things
Another way you can help to make things easier on yourself is by doing as much as possible yourself. I’m quite good at design and creating things so I designed all the ‘paper’ aspects of our wedding and printed them myself. This meant I didn’t have to wait weeks for the designers and then the printers, instead we had it all done in a weekend.
Another thing I did was to do most of the decoration myself and to keep it all simple. I started out with collecting glasses and bottles that I knew I wanted for the table decorations and then decorated them as we got closer to the day. Having made the decisions early allowed me time to collect the things I needed too.
Get your Date Out Early
When people plan a wedding with several years to spare they tend to send out a ‘save the date’ so that people know about the date. However, when you book the wedding 6 months in advance and only a few weeks after getting engaged people need a bit of warning. This was even more true because we’d chosen a date that was over the Christmas period when people tend to be seeing family. Another tip, is if you’re inviting people from abroad then get the date out to them as soon as possible so they have time to organise their travel.
This post is now over 1000 words, so I’m going to leave it there for today but if you have any more questions about planning a wedding in 6 months just leave me a comment. We’re half way through this week of weeding posts now! Check back tomorrow for another instalment.
PIN IT FOR LATER
