In just over 4 months, I am getting married. I had initially planned to share our wedding planning and money saving tips on another website, but I just haven’t had the time for the upkeep, and this week that domain expired. So I have decided to start sharing some wedding posts on here and I hope you enjoy them!
It is really difficult to get everything you want in a wedding, within a set budget. There has to be compromise and we chose to compromise on the budget. We are spending more money that we would like, but everything within our control is as cheap as we can make it (flowers, my dress, suits, decorations, sweet buffet, etc). Things out of our control, such as the venue and catering are the things that are pushing our wedding budget up.
Choosing our venue
We had a difficult decision to make when choosing where to get married. It came down to one venue in the UK or somewhere in Florida. We eventually settled on getting married in the UK, Chippenham Park to be exact, and it pains me that a wedding here is going to cost more than it would have cost us to fly 10 family and friends over to Florida, pay for their accommodation, flights and to get married.
We were completely blown away by the beauty of Chippenham Park. It is utterly breathtaking, and we are hoping to get married in the “summer house”, which is a wooden gazebo by the lake. If the weather is windy then there is another wooden gazebo surrounded by a circular hedge to get married under. And if it rains then there is an old ballroom for us to say our vows.
We opted to get married on a Thursday during half term, as it was half the cost of a Saturday wedding. It means that naturally some people won’t be able to get time off work, or they may not want to use their annual leave allowance to attend, but we know that our immediate families can definitely make it.
Food
We did the one thing I said we wouldn’t do, and we chose a venue with an exclusive caterer. Whilst the caterers do provide a high quality of food and service, they are double the cost of other caterers we have seen. Since we are spending so much, we have opted for what feels like a feast! We went to a wedding last year where the food was served buffet style, and I hated it. My table was called 50 minutes after the head table, and when we got there, there was nothing left! I have been adamant that people will not go hungry at our wedding.
There will be canapés at the drinks reception, a BBQ style meal with lots of options for the wedding breakfast with 5 mini desserts to choose from. The evening food will include a buffet and mini fish and chips. I have already roped in about 5 people to ensure that there is food for me to eat – a few months ago a friend of mine didn’t even get to eat at her evening reception as the food was all gone.
Drink
Our venue charge a corkage charge for bringing our own alcohol, but it still worked out much cheaper than buying wine from the venue. We have managed to get some brilliant deals along the way. We managed to get 12 bottles of Prosecco and 6 bottles of Buck’s Fizz for just £34 from Sainsbury’s, and the rest of our wine for just £2.20 a bottle from Tesco. This all happened from combining special offers and new customer discounts.
Theme
We had originally planned for a Disney’s “Up” themed wedding, but this has evolved into a Disney princess wedding. This may surprise you, but it was actually Tony’s idea! Each table will be a different Disney princess and I am having so much fun sourcing items for each table. Lots of ideas are pinned to my Disney wedding board. For other areas of the wedding, such as the ceremony, we are going for pastel colours (blue and pink mostly).
Wedding planner
Wait a minute, isn’t this a thrifty blog? Well yes, it is. We weren’t planning on hiring a wedding planner – we viewed it as a waste of money, but we came across someone at a wedding fayre who hired out some items we were interested in. As we got talking, we found that they could dress the venue for us, hire equipment to us and generally take care of things for a very affordable price! Just £50 ensures that they will be there on our wedding day to refill the sweet buffet, to fix anything that goes wrong and just generally make sure things run smoothly. And because our theme means all the tables are different, we wanted someone we could trust to set them up exactly how we wanted.
Our wedding planner has also helped us to negotiate discounts when we haven’t felt quite confident enough to do so. In fact, we are £300 “in profit” from the savings our wedding planner has been able to get for us.
Flowers
We aren’t having flowers on each table, instead we just need bouquets, buttonholes and flowers to decorate the ceremony’s gazebo. I was planning on getting silk or foam bouquets from eBay, but one of my ex-colleagues, Irene, runs Wedding Flowers and Cakes. Her bouquets are cheaper than buying silk/foam ones I had been looking at, and we get to enjoy real flowers. Irene has been extremely helpful, suggesting cheaper alternatives and working within our budget.
Favours
I am really excited to share our wedding favours with you. I knew exactly what they woul be the moment I stepped into a Target store just after we got engaged. Our wedding favours are silver tins filled with tissue paper, flavoured vodka and sweets. At the moment they have cost us well under $3 each – around £1.92 each. Children attending will get goody bags filled with items we’ve picked up in various sales – toys, pens, puzzles and more. They deserve a post of their own!
Honeymoon
If you have been reading my blog for awhile, or you follow me on social media, then you will have no doubt as to where we are honeymooning. We are heading to Disneyworld, Florida for our honeymoon. We had originally planned to leave it a few months and go in October, but then Virgin Atlantic had a sale and I pounced on it. This time we are planning on spending a few nights “on site” in Disney hotels. Looking at hotels.com, it will probably be The Grand Floridian and Animal Kingdom Savannah view villa, with a private villa in between the two.
We were planning on having a Disney Cruise around the Western Caribbean, but it was over £1,000 more than going in October, so we have decided to leave it for another year.
The W word
I don’t know what it is about the “wedding” word, but it instantly puts on at least 50% to any prices. I remember asking a supplier for a quote for some chocolate covered strawberries and some brownies – it was £450! So many people advised me not to mention that we were getting a quote for a wedding, but it was difficult in practice.
That’s it for now – there is so much more that I want to share with you. If you want to read some other wedding stuff I have written, I have been writing wedding money saving posts for Bride2Bride, such as How To Haggle With Your Wedding Venue and Doing Your Own Flowers.
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