Tips and Tricks Thursday

This week’s topic is tips and tricks for planning a wedding to remember.

1. Get used to compromising.

I love and adore all you future bloggy brides and I know you want to avoid a starring role on the show Bridezilla. Avoiding any and all Bridezilla moments is impossible. But if you don’t get used to compromising you might be on the show. There is no way for you to have everything go your way unless you plan on looking like a two year old temper tantrum throwing fool. Guess what?! It is practice for that thing that comes after the wedding, MARRIAGE! You get to do a whole lot more compromising after the big white dress comes off.

We had an outdoor ceremony on a lovely sunny day in October 2009. I wanted flowers that wouldn’t wilt in the warm October sun and gave a more casual feel. I wanted gerbera daisies. Add theknot.com to your favorites. I visited that site a lot when planning our wedding. I found pictures on the knot of gerbera daisy boutonnières and showed them to Hubby. He was not a fan. We looked at a lot of boutonnieres and he only like roses. So we added some roses to the bouquets and the cake and ta da! Compromise! Honestly looking at my bouquet makes me smile because it is a symbol of the compromise I made to make my Hubby happy.

2. Pick a time frame and location.

You may want to get married on a special day or you might have your heart set on a special location. If you want to get married on a specific day at a specific place you might have to wait a year or two. So this could be compromise #1.

Hubby bought my dream ring when I was with him ring shopping in November of 2008. We were staying with my parents in Nor Cal and I called them right after he bought it. I will never forget calling my dad with the biggest smile on my face and telling him I was carrying a Tacori bag and he didn’t know what that was and was like uh ok. Dork! We showed them the ring when we got back to their place. But my great grandmother’s diamond wasn’t going to be put into the ring until December and Hubby still had to officially propose. Because we live 8 hours away from our parents there were discussions about where to have the wedding. I told my mom that if I had the wedding near her she would have to help me out a lot (compromise). So after the ring was bought my parents began the search.

Do I have amazing parents or what? I’m an only child so that might be part of the reason they didn’t mind spending their weekends looking at wedding sites for us. I would email them places I found online and they found places on their own and visited. They took a lot of things into consideration. I would say one of the top things on my dad’s list was if they accepted credit cards. I think this is a great tip for you planners. My dad realized that some of these places were going under and he didn’t want to write them a check for thousands of dollars without a guarantee of a wedding. He figured that he would be able to get his money back if he needed to for any reason from the credit card company. Plus hello frequent flyer miles! (I don’t know what card they used and what benefits they got, I’m just saying).

Pay attention to the vibe you get from the people and the place. There was a woman that forgot about their appointment, um yeah no thanks. Another place was near the train tracks. We didn’t notice until like time 20 of watching our wedding video but you can hear a train in the background of our ceremony. But this other place you would have to stop your ceremony and wait for the train to go by. My mom the green thumb that she was, paid attention to the flowers. She knew we were thinking summer time for the wedding and there were some places that looked pretty with lots of rose bushes but those bushes wouldn’t be in bloom when we wanted to get married.

The place we ended up getting married at impressed my parents. The owner/wedding planner was in the military so he is really good at sticking to a schedule and making sure everything gets done. They do hundreds of weddings and events every year. Their packages were all inclusive. They were the dj, caterer, cake maker and had contacts and people that were familiar with the site for the florist, photographers, and reverend. That made things 1,000 times easier because we didn’t have to interview and meet with people, especially since we don’t live close by.

I realized I have a lot of tips and wisdom on this topic. I might do more posts with more advice.

*Don't be jealous of my classy wedding pictures!