planning

Tallahassee | Upcoming Bridal Shows

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Bridal Show icon with lights and velvet rope

While on the venue hunt (more about that, later) I happened to see an announcement one venue’s website about a small Bridal Show being held–that very evening!–at My Favorite Things.

Thankfully, MFT is less that 5 minutes from my house, so I detoured on the way home from work to see what was up.

Flying solo at one of these things is never my first choice, but with barely 4 hours notice you just do what you have to do. I had a couple of very nice chats with some vendors, learned a few things I thought I knew but was wrong about, and found out about two more bridal shows this month!

So, Tallahassee, FL, (and the surrounding area) ladies, heads up:

On Sunday, February 19, 2012, the Tallahassee Garden Club is hosting the Garden Center Bride. From 1-5 pm local brides-to-be and their buddies can tour what I’m told is a beautiful and popular venue and have a chat with other locally-owned wedding vendors. Word on the street is that if you go and register you’ll be eligible for a discount if you then book your event there. The fee is $5 per person, at the door.

Tallahassee Garden Center
507 N Calhoun St

On Monday, February 27, Tallahassee Assn of Wedding Professionals is hosting a Boutique Bridal Show at Goodwood Museum and Gardens. Pre-registration grants you early, VIP access to the vendors starting at 5:30 pm. Brides pay $15–either pre-registered or at the door–while additional guests are just $5 at the door.

Goodwood Museum and Gardens
1600 Miccosukee Rd

Also, while not technically a bridal show, on Thursday, February 16, 2012, from 6 to 8 pm, department store Belk is hosting an Engagement Party . Check your local store for more info, but if you haven’t started your registry yet, this would be as good a time as any!

I guess everyone is trying to capitalize on the recent holiday engagements. Can’t say I blame them one bit!

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

 

Know of any other Bridal Shows in the southeast? Let me know!

Robbing Florals to Pay Rings

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Wedding rings on top of cash

aka Figuring out just how your going to pay for what you want

Research weddings for any amount of time and you’ll get more than you ever wanted to know about where the budget should be spent. I despise the word “should.” Should implies that I have to do something because that’s how other people did it. And while I’m not one to have a problem with authority, I do take umbrage with those who pretend to know what I want more than me.

But having something like this sample budget allotment does give us a good place to start, so I’m not going to throw the budget out with the bathwater.

Here’s the basic breakdown for our $5K Wedding, as suggested by The Knot and Real Simple:

Reception $2425-2500
(including venue, rentals, food and beverage)

Attire $500
(bride and groom clothes and accessories)

Flowers/Decorations$500
(if it doesn’t come with the site, it goes here)

Music $400-500
(dj or band or your ipod and some speakers)

Photos & Videos $500-600
(includes the prints, too)

Favors & Gifts $150
(for guests, attendants and each other)

Ceremony $100-130
(site and officiant fees)

Stationery $150
(anything paper that gets mailed or handed-out)

Rings $100
(self-explanatory)

Transportation $50-150
(limos, valets and any hotel rooms for the bride and groom)

The biggest difference between the two suggested allotments were between music and photos: The Knot prefers photos to music and Real Simple considered them equal contenders.

Now, some of those amounts are absolutely laughable: $100 for 2 wedding bands?! Sure, I could find them like that online from some warehouse but we might have to monkey things around just a bit. Like maybe going the iPod route instead of a dj and freeing up those funds for other uses, and having the ceremony and reception at the same venue so as to avoid car rentals, 2 location fees and who knows what else.

We do agree that the reception taking up half the budget makes sense as one of our priorities is good food and drinks. Meanwhile flowers will probably get nixed altogether in favor of less-perishable, more economical options made by moi, as will pretty much all the stationery needs. That doesn’t mean we get to totally zero out those ledger lines, there will still be expenses involved (like stamps!), but they will be much less than these estimates with the rest made up in “sweat equity.”

And while there’s still the possibility of adding more to the budget (funds, not expenditures) by the time it’s all said and done, I don’t really have a problem being a couple with more time than money to pull off this wedding.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

Does your proposed budget make you shudder? 
Or are you, like us, determined to make it work? 

A Laughable Amount

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Jar with coins inside

Since one of the pluses to a long engagement is the ability to save up for the wedding expenses over time, perhaps it’s time to broach the subject of exactly what our budget is. After all, budget it one of the big three to decide early on, along with when and where, and can have quite a bit to do with the latter.

I firmly believe that your wedding can be as lavish as you want; it doesn’t matter if it’s your first or your fifth. Whatever you want–as long as you can afford it–go for it.

And while Todd and I are a double-income-no-kids household, in possession of good jobs and able pay our bills every month a wedding budget wasn’t really something we’d planned on needing, oh, ever. Since I changed the rules, so to speak, on that topic, we had to confront the issue that if we wanted a wedding, we would need to pay for it.

Being the non-saver of our duo, I had to take a hard look at what I could realistically save up over the next 2 years and a bit. I figured $100 a month would be tight for me (for reasons I’ll get to in another post) but I could do it. That sounds like a lot, right?

Um, yeah. $2500. Double that because Todd is already adept at saving and I’m insisting we do this equally and you’ve got our starting wedding budget: $5000. (Okay, because we started saving before the engagement was official, it’s more in the $5500 range but let’s be cautious because, well, it’s me. And while there are plans for being able to increase that amount, it’s our bare-bones budget and the safe number to work from.)

I’ll sigh while you laugh.

But I know we can do it! It may not be easy as pie but I’m convinced it’ll all work out okay, we’ll just have to do a few things that every bride and groom have had to do since the beginning of time, even those with unlimited budgets:

  1. Prioritize
  2. Shop Smart
  3. Make Some Sacrifices

Plus, we’ve got a few things on our side:

  1. Small guest list–we’re talking a cap of 50 people, including us!
  2. I’m an inveterate crafter with my own in-home studio (own my own Gocco and everything) and Todd is quite handy with tools and such.
  3. We don’t want a big massive show-stopper of an event, just a good party to celebrate this next step in our lives together.

Next thing is to figure out how to allocate our meager funds to make sure we get not the perfect wedding, but a wedding that’s perfectly us!

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

 

How did you figure out how much your wedding budget would be?

The Decision of Where

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning
image via stock.xchng | illustration by lockheed

image via stock.xchng | illustration by lockheed

Before a lot of wedding details can fall into place, the subject of where it’s all going to happen usually needs to be dealt with.

Traditionally, brides returned to their hometown to be married. After all, that’s where the parents (and, therefore, the money) were and all those childhood friends and extended family. Of course, these days our personal worlds are much more global, but many first-time brides still choose their hometown or somewhere familiar for their nuptials.

The returning bride, however, might have made a life for herself far from the old homestead and chances are good the groom has travelled a bit, too. Suddenly, going “home” doesn’t make as much sense as staying put and, even then, choosing a location can be tough.

Both Mr. Trips and I live far away from most of our family and while our wedding will be the small, intimate sort, we still want to make things simple for any out of town guests who wish to attend.

Some things to consider:

  • Is there adequate hotel space near the chosen spot for out-of-towners or do are there enough local friends who’d be willing to put them up for a night or 3?
  • For guests flying-in, how’s your local airport set? I know flying into and out of Tallahassee can be a bit of a bear and often increases the cost involved. Scouting out shuttle services from nearby cities or planning extra activities surrounding the wedding to entertain those out of town guests is a nice touch since they may opt for a longer stay to get better rates (flying in on Friday and out on Sunday being trés pricey compared to in on Thursday and out on Monday or Tuesday).
  • Destination weddings can even the playing-field a bit–everyone travels!–but can also exclude some folks you’d really want to be there if funds are tight (and, let’s face it, everyone is feeling the pinch these days).

There’s more to this than a simply your city or mine.

Add to this, living in a college town and planning a fall wedding meant dealing with football schedules. Not because we’re fans (sports are not something we’re majorly invested in), but because a large chunk of our city virtually shuts down on game days (and heaven forbid it be homecoming weekend). Since we wouldn’t know until February of 2013 (more than a year from when we started location scouting) if there would be a home game that weekend, we pretty much had to cut out any place downtown or near campus, as traffic could create major issues.

I was tempted, though–the last two years showed an off weekend or a Thursday night game for the first weekend of November, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to take that chance.

What were the big factors in deciding your wedding location?
Or was there even really a choice? 

Setting a Date

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning
Scattered clear calendar tiles

image via stock.xchng | photograph by mai05

Setting a wedding date is tricky, especially if you’re thinking of having a long engagement. Sure, looking 2 years out means you’re more likely to find the spot you want available on that day, but first you have to figure out the when. It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing–the where may depend on the when and vice versa.

For me, though, there’s one other bit that matters: we already have an anniversary! We met, and got to know one another, online and dated long distance for the first few months of our relationship. We’ve always considered our anniversary, however, to be the day we first met in person–Nov. 2. Mr. Road Trip came to town for the weekend and we consider that Friday, the night of our first date, our anniversary.

My dating history, by the way, leaves something to be desired. What I lacked in quality, apparently, I made up in quantity if you count all those first/blind dates that never went anywhere.There seemed to be a few pretty steady lines of demarcation:

  • If we were still talking after the first date, 3 weeks seemed to be the next drop-off point.
  • If we were still dating after 3 weeks, 3 months was the milestone it most likely ended upon.
  • If we made it past 3 months, though (and this was rare), at a year things fizzled.
  • Unless, of course, we decided to get married. In which case, we never quite made it to 3 years.

Yes, you read that right: neither of my previous marriages lasted 3 years. I also had the nickname of gypsy for a while, 3 years being the longest I’d lived in any one place and even then most were shorter stints.

Looking back I kinda have to wonder why I’ve always considered 3 my “lucky” number.

So Mr. Road Trip comes along. A bit more than 6 months after we start dating, he moves to Florida. A year after that we move in together (signing that lease was a scary thing, indeed!) and then we renew our lease. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that, as we approached that 3 year point, I was a bit nervous. Okay, I was paranoid.

But here’s the thing: we were still talking. We were more than talking, we actually LIKED being together as much as we possibly could. We’d gone on trips, even a 7-day cruise, and hadn’t needed time apart.

So, now that we’s achieved the illusive 3 years and were still going strong (a major factor in my thought process in the me vs marriage debate) I didn’t want to give up those years we’ve already logged in our relationship. I don’t want to have to pick another date and start all over at day 1 again.

I want to get married on our anniversary.

When I realized this I grabbed my calendar to check out the upcoming years. (Keep in mind, this was still pre-proposal, so I might have been jumping the gun a tad but, hey, a girl’s gotta know what she’s working with!) Turned out, November 2nd falls on a Friday in 2012 and a Saturday in 2013–perfect! And, hey, if we want or need to make it a really long engagement, there’s still a Sunday in 2014 (though I hope it doesn’t come to that, honestly–I said I wanted to try a long engagement but not that long!).

And, yes, I did broach the subject with Mr. Road Trip, pre-proposal–mainly because my head was swimming with ideas and thoughts and maybes and maybe-nots so I wanted us to be on the same page. Turns out, the way he saw it, he’d considered himself ahead of me when it came to future-thinking and my obsession has managed to catch us up to each other.

Did you have any date dilemma when planning your wedding?

Which came first, the when or the where?