A wedding on a budget!

When it comes to getting married everyone has a different idea of what they would like and how they would like their day to go.

Some girls dream about their wedding days their entire life, they have a plan in there mind of exactly how they would like there dream day to go.

My husband proposed to me on Coca beach in Florida during the sunset right after a thunderstorm( yes awfully romantic!)

We had been together 5 and a half years at this point.

We always said once we got engaged we would just get married.

We talked about what wedding we would like and initially looked into doing a destination wedding but for various reasons we decided against this idea.

We ended up deciding to do a Christmas Wedding. Our first real date was 19th December and Adam first asked me to be his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, so this has always been a special time for us.

We found our perfect venue which was a little wooden lodge in the forest which they decorated with fairy lights and and a huge tree for Christmas!

When we initially wrote the list of everyone we would like to invite we had a list of 110 people. This seemed totally normal, but then we started getting quotations! To have 110 people to our wedding we were looking at a overall spend of around 10k.

We realised we either had to cut the list or wait a few years to get married, so we cut the list.

We decided just to invite our very very closest friends and family. We didn't invite any old friends we hadn't seen in years or family we never see. This left us with a guest list of 28 people.

I loved doing it so small, it was much more intimate.

Every wedding is unique and everyones ideas are different. I am going to tell you about our wedding and if you take some thrifty ideas away then great :)

Here's the breakdown;

Wedding dress

I brought my wedding dress in Monsoon, it was £220 and beautiful.

This for me was perfect.

Bridesmaids dresses

Beautiful blue dresses from Dorothy Perkins £35 each.

They were lovely dresses and could easily be worn again.

The bridesmaid did there own hair and makeup the way they wanted and wore there own shoes which I loved because they put their own spin on their outfit.

Suits

We just told the groomsmen to wear their own suits and we gave them matching ties. This saved us a fortune hiring suits and they were more comfortable in there own.

We actually got the ties on amazon for about £12 each.

Flowers

We made our wedding flowers ourselves with flowers from Dunelms.
I initially had a quote from a florist and there bouquets ranged from£60-£120.
I liked the idea of false flowers not only for the cost but we wouldn't have to worry about getting anything delivered on the day(Especially when December is snow time for England.) Plus we would be able to keep the flowers after.
The flowers totaled at £35.

Table Decorations
I bought clear vases from Wilkinson's, stuffed with them blue tissue paper and then each bridesmaid put there bouquet in one. Viola they doubled up as table decorations!
My bouquet went in the centre of the top table.

Decorations
We didn't need to decorate anything because it was Christmas so the venue was already decorated!

Food
The food at our wedding venue was totally amazing!
We got married later in the day so we only had to provide one meal instead of meal and a buffet, this saved a fortune.
We served a 3 course meal to everyone and then in the evening had a few people walking around with a few nibbles.

Gifts for the parents
We brought a Champneys gift set for the mums and really nice wine for the Dads.


Music
We put together CD's of all of our favorite music instead of hiring a DJ.
We had calm mellow music playing during dinner and made it more lively as the time went on.


Entertainment
This is probably going to sound really tacky and lame but it really wasnt.. it was really funny!
We put them balloons on each table that you blow up and let go and they fly around the room making a squealing noise.
We also put party poppers, crackers and disposable cameras on the tables.

For the end of the night we brought Chinese lanterns to let go into the sky, this was really nice.

Place cards
We gave Adams little sister £20 and let her make them! They looked absolutely fantastic too :)

The Cake
Although wedding cakes are beautiful, they are very expensive so I looked into alternatives.
There is a local sandwich shop that we go to that sells the most amazing homemade chocolate brownies, we asked them to make us a wedding cake out of them!
This was only £60 and we still get people today talk about how amazing our cake was!
Another idea I did like was a huge pile of profiteroles instead of a cake!

Photographer
We weren't actually going to have a photographer, we just asked everyone to bring their cameras but one of Adams friends is a photographer and volunteered to take a few pics for us.
We also put disposable cameras on each table, these photos are my absolute favourite I really recommend doing this.
My uncle also filmed the ceremony on his video camera which came out excellent!

Honeymoon
We go on big holidays every year, holidays have always been the thing we will spend our money on.
We decided for our honeymoon just to go to London for a few days.
This is the place our first date was and we go there all the time but have never stayed over.
We booked a 5 star hotel through Price line and stayed for 3 nights for about £250.
I loved the idea of staying in the UK for our honeymoon because we can go back and do this every year for our wedding anniversary now:)

Transport
We hired an 11 seat limo to take me, some of my family and bridesmaids to the venue.
I bartered on the price for this and ended up getting it nearly half of the price they originally quoted.
The limo also picked us up at the end of day and took us into London.


So that's if for this week, if you have any thrifty wedding tips leave a comment.


See you next week :)