Mumsnet Talk

DP and I are getting married!

We're not into the whole white wedding thing, however we do want to have a celebration with our family and friends.

I've had a go at doing an initial list and I reckon it's at least 150 people (including 30 DCs).

We've got musician type friends so that bit of the wedding is sorted. I've seen type of the dress I want and it's about £250.

I'm guessing the biggest expense will be catering for everyone?

Is it possible to do a wedding for so many people without spending an absolute fortune. Has anyone got any tips? Perhaps on a venue with reasonable proces. We're definitely open to alternative suggestions!

How can you cater for so many people, nicely, without spending an arm and a leg?

TIS

That should be TIA!

Goodness knows what TIS means?!!

Our guests will be coming from far and wide (many from over 500 miles away) so we need to plan for them having somewhere to stay, for many of them the night before as well as the night of the wedding.

Although we'll expect the guests to pay their own accommodation (this is normal isn't it?), we need to make sure they can stay somewhere nice but not extortionate.

This is quite a logistical undertaking, isn't it?!

A friend of mine on a budget did a huge picnic for the meal and got lots of friends to help her make the picnic food. Each 'table' got a basket and a rug.

She was lucky with the weather!

Could you not hire a village hall & basically cater it yourselves just with a finger buffet or something?

Maybe not you personally but ask a close friend or family member to oversee it? Or even getting caterers in for a buffet would be a lot cheaper than a sit down meal.

My friend had a 'bring a plate' wedding with people coming from all over the world, they managed even with travelling, the food had loads of variety, and nobody paid a lot.
Whatever you do, enjoy it!

The picnic sounds lovely but I don't think my nerves could cope with the good weather gamble!

I've found a venue I really like. It's kinda faded grandeur rather than grand, I stayed there as in the hotel a few years back and it's one of the friendliest places I've ever stayed.

Their wedding package is way over out budget though! They assume you'll hire the whole place. I've emailed and asked if they can break it down to just what we need.

Also, it is acceptable to expect guests to pay their own accommodation costs, isn't it? The place I'm thinking of has options from posh 4 poster (reckon we'll have one of those!) through to camping via dorms, so people can get what suits their budget.

Yes, you can do it cheaply, just stay off the usual wedding circuit. Your catering and venue will be what pushes the cost up, so treat it like a birthday party and not a wedding, and you'll be fine. That's probably easier to do if you don't get married at the same place as the reception, and keep things on the classy-but-relaxed side rather than the formal-wedding-breakfast-and-evening-reception side. I think it's fine to expect wedding guests to pay for their own accommodation.

Book the latest ceremony slot at your chosen venue (think ours was 3.30pm), then people will have had lunch allready.

Photos after ceremony and jugs of Pimms or something.

All in for a fork.buffet (cheaper than a plated dinnet but not as cheap.as a finger buffet). Two courses (drop the starter), have the fork buffet about 5.30.

Disco provided by the venue or open mic for your friends

Cut the cake later (say 9pm) and serve to keep people going! Maybe look at the wedding cakes made of cheese and serve.with crackers, chutneys and fruit.

These were the cheapest type of weddings avaliable at our venue (where I work).

No not expected to pay for accomodation and id only expect a reception drink and or a glass of wine with dinner. Id expect a pay bar in the evening

Accomodation: find local b+b's and ask if they'll do a discount rate for you to book the place.

My parents' 25th wedding anniversary: Keg of beer from local brewery. Boxes of wine from France. Fish and chips from chippie next door. Hired a school hall, lots of tables and chairs available. Band made up of mates. Plastic crockery and cutlery. Pea shooters and party games as centre pieces.

Awesome party, incredibly cheap and low stress!

Not sure if that made sense! I mean both staying in dorms and camping are options, not that there's some kind of weird camping in dorms arrangement!

Perhaps worth mentioning that lots of our friends have hippy tendencies and would be happy in tents! We could even maybe borrow some teepees and large bell tents from friends and deck them out.

Hire the church hall or school playing field and arrange for campers to be allowed to stay?

the nicest wedding I have EVER been to was a marquee on the grass outside our village hall. Horrible weather outside, but marquee lovely and warm. They had some one cater a pig roast with we collected buffet style with salad. The dad had done a booze run to france for the fizz and wine. They had a disco.

Our wedding was even cheaper, large tent on parents lawn (to hold booze etc.)
It was cold but dry. Family and friends ran a BBq. Friends were all booked into local B&B's and paid themselves. Got a couple of barrels of beer in from a local brewery, plus booze from supermarkets etc.

Get married on a Friday, don't invite people to the wedding, and just book the venue as an evening party - a lot cheaper.

Then invite friends for the evening celebration, so you'll only need to cater for the evening buffet. Get rid of the wedding breakfast, and that will cut out a lot of your costs.

Some of my friends have done this and it's a great compromise. The best one was an evening ball to celebrate. Everyone dressed up in black tie, had a fab time (one of the best weddings I went to) and it stands out for all the right reasons.

Worst wedding was where they tried to invite too many on too small a budget and cut corners (you can only cut so many before people notice, even with the whole village hall thing).

My advice, go for something totally different. Then people won't notice the savings

Our money saving tips were as follows:

- bridesmaids wore their own dresses and looked stunning
- no posh special wedding cars - used local taxi firm who sent a shiny silver merc and put ribbons on - cost £20 per car!
- ushers and best man wore own suits
- autumn/winter weddings save money on flowers - we picked ivy and used ivy and candles

Aw, I want our friends there at the ceremony <old romantic>

Take your point about cutting corners though!

We have lots of musician friends, some of whom who I hope will play as our present, so the entertainment should be great - we just need the space and license for that really.

I plan to give the bridesmaids a contribution to the dresses (£50?) and then let them choose what they want, it won't be coordinated. Also hairdressing on the day (flowers in our hair etc) but hoping to get that fairly cheap from a friend of a friend.

The day will be fairly unconventional so we can do away with lots of the traditional stuff that costs £££.

A contribution to their dresses would be a lovely gesture. If I were a BM and allowed to wear any dress I wanted, id be happy to buy it myself so a donation would be much appreciated!

A thing my friend wants is to ask all the women attending to wear a certain colour so they can all be bridrsmaids

We had a big white wedding very cheaply but it was lovely. Think about your friends' talents and ask them if they could do something on the day, eg a friend of mine had formerly been a florist - also you can pad out the flowers with lots of greenery, my mum's a music teacher, she organised some of her Grade 8 pupils to play for us - they wanted an opportunity to perform! Another friend sorted out the catering - we had a buffet style meal rather than sit-down. Some other friends have quite a large open-plan house, and let us hold the reception there - we were worried about space but needn't have been as people were happy to mill around. FIL did the photos (they were ok... I think he'd bigged up his abilities with a camera but other guests sent me copies of their photos). None of my BMs were particularly girly girls and wore DMs which we bought from the outlet place in Rushden for £20 a pair then sprayed them silver with spray paint!

Our cakes were from M&S, a friend put the dowling in so we could just take them to reception venue, stack them and decorate with fresh flower petals. So that cost about a quarter of the cheapest price we were quoted for a wedding cake.

I'm going to have one go at asking for a quote from a wedding venue - the one I mentioned above. I asked them if they'd be happy to work with us to find a package that suited us rather than hiring the whole venue and they said yes, as long as we'd be happy to avoid the peak season, so it'd have to be sometime Sept - March.

They're such a lovely place, and when you don't put the word "wedding" in front of the occasion, fairly reasonably priced! If they can't offer us something affordable then I can be pretty sure we need to look at alternatives.

Not sure if that makers sense! I mean if they can't give us an affordable quote then I need to forget about traditional wedding venues completely and go with something more DIY.

Bring and share meal. It is bog easy for everyone and cuts the single biggest cost right down. Obviously you don't ask for wedding presents, which cuts the cost for them attending as well. Actually, quite a lot of people will give you presents anyway.

You should still ideally provide drink though, but it's amazing how cheap that can be compared with food!

I'm thinking for 150 guests incl. DCs, we'd need to ask them to quote for:

- the room for the wedding & whatever charges they have associated with the actual marriage bit
- meal (maybe sit down if affordable, if not then buffet)
- room for party till late (we supply all music)

What have I missed?!
What else do the venue need to provide?

tables and chairs. May or may not be included.

Table numbers if you have a sit down meal (have a buffet!).

Corkage if you want to take your own drink.

"Bring and share meal." it's a lovely idea, but as at least half the wedding party will have traveled over 500 miles to be there, I'm worried that it seems a bit impractical to ask them to travel with food in their bags! What do you think?

Buffet probably does make more sense doesn't it.

I remembered something else we need, a room for the DCs. I went to a wedding in a big manor house where there was a games room with lots of cool stuff for the DCs to play with. It wasn't that they weren't welcome at the wedding - they were - it was just somewhere for them to retreat to when it got too boring, where they could play and let off steam if they wanted to. It worked really well.

"Buffet probably does make more sense doesn't it."

Sorry, I mean it makes more sense than sit-down, specifically.

If this is too pricey, we're going to have think about other things like maybe "bring and share"

'impractical to ask them to travel with food'

Depends what you ask them to bring, and also what transport they will mostly be using. Also if there's a kitchen on site where they could assemble something that was easier to transport separately (such as a salad).

If they'll mostly be on public transport, I do see your point You could look at supermarket party catering? The only caution there is that IME they are tight on quantities, whereas any hired caterer is so expensive that they tend to over-cater with no risk of running out.

People will be coming by a mixture of methods I imagine: car, train and plane. A fair number of them have DCs.

I feel like it's a bit much to ask really, isn't it?

You could ask a few of the more distant ones what they think.

If it's a choice between making a pudding (i.e. buying 4 punnets of strawberries and a pint of cream and shoving them in a cool bag on the day) or a main course (i.e. boiling a ham joint or baking a tray of sausages) and buying a wedding present, which costs more and requires more thinking time/traipsing about? It means you know there is something that you and your children will eat at the wedding, and tbh the meal is usually MASSIVELY better than most caterers' food, and lavishly over quantified.

You would need a food team at the reception to 'receive' and set out the food I think.

I do see that the ones who are flying in would need to be excused! Sometimes people provide the main course and ask people to bring a pudding or a salad/vegetable?

We do have several foodie friends, including some chefs. If we're going to go down a DIY route, I reckon I'd rather see if a group of our friends are up for doing catering instead of presents, instead of involving the whole party of guests.

I really wouldn't feel comfortable asking them all to bring food.

Hmm, that could work actually ...

Thanks everyone, this is really useful!

twolittlemonkeys your wedding sounds lovely!

<wonders which kind friend has a house large enough to lend us >

aufaniae we are in a similar position to you, in that a lot of our guests will have to fly (only approx 2 hr flight, but with waiting time plus travel to airport, etc etc) or get on the ferry (3 hour journey plus travel to port). I agree that asking people to bring food is not really practical - ok so they could go to a supermarket once they're here, but how many trays of sausage rolls and mini scotch eggs can one wedding handle?

We are still in the very early stages of planning, but I had been thinking of a 4pm (or thereabouts) wedding with evening buffet in a function room of some kind. We also expect quite a few children, so I thought of buying loads of board games from charity shops etc, have a wii or similar set up with that dance game on, and just get everyone to have FUN. Its not really the wedding I would like if money were no object, but I feel that trying to cobble together the wedding we would like with the budget we have will just look terrible, so the only option is to go for something totally different (as a prior poster said).

Some cost-cutting ideas (used at our wedding):

Wedding lunch just for small group of immediate family/friends.
Evening party for 100 held in a barn at a local farm.
Camera-mad mate recruited as photographer.
Mate with flash car recruited as wedding driver.
Wine from Calais booze-cruise.
High street dress and shoes.
Cake made and decorated by arty aunty.
Local pub doing simple buffet in the evening and providing kegs of beer.
Flowers from local market, arranged in cheap IKEA glasses.

It was fab, and didn't feel "cheap" at all.

Ooh getting friends to do the catering sounds ideal!! Probably a lot easier to organise all round.

OK, really naive question here! What are the flowers for?

Do you mean button holes? Or the posy? Or flowers to decorate the venue? (I'm guessing that's the pricey one!)

Are all of these essential?

Flowers at a wedding I guess are at bottom (so to speak) a fertility symbol. They survive as a tradition because they look nice and because wedding flowers are potentially profitable. But it's very personal.

I was very pleased to carry flowers at both my weddings, I liked both the symbolism and the reality; a tied posy or something like that isn't all that expensive. I had a hand-tied round bouquet of yellow roses at my first wedding that cost ?£30 - I ordered it to be done by phone at a florists' down the road from the register office and my mum popped in to collect it on the day. Carrying a single gerbera looked pretty cool on ER and is a bit 90s generally but still nice IMO. A flower in the groom's buttonhole I think is also nice. If professionally done they do last longer as arrangements but it's also possible just to pick or buy loose flowers if you choose a flowery time of year (hence June's popularity). Buttonholes for other people I think are an unnecessary expense - personal again. Flowers in the venue are very expensive indeed, hence the popularity of balloons, ribbons, shells, pebbly shit etc. Again you could probably get a team of guests with gardens to help out here??

We bought flowers mainly to decorate the venue (it was a barn, after all). I don't think we spent more than £20 for the whole place, and we supplemented the market flowers with ivy and stuff from the garden and just a little pebbly shit.

pebbly shit

All the flowers at our wedding came from friends' and family's gardens.
As much as we could, we did ourselves.

It was a lovely day.

Flowers for me were a boquet, button holes and a long and low for the registry table which then got put in front of me and dh on the dining table.

I would try to look elsewhere for a venue too - we found hotels just could not offer the flexibility and value for money we wanted i.e so we could bring in our own caterers, have free booze ( bought at great prices from the supermarket) all day and all night..

It's perfectly possible - lots of "traditional" things are utterly unnecessary

- late afternoon ceremony so you only need to supply one meal
- buffet style meal is MUCH cheaper - a lot less manpower for the venue, no elaborate table laying
- we saved a lot by just using taxis instead of hiring posh cars
- keeping the clothes dress simple - the £250 you mention is much more sensible than the thousands people will spend on a fantasy dress.

It's much more important to have all the people you love there, than that every luxury is provided.

"It's much more important to have all the people you love there, than that every luxury is provided." I agree, absolutely!

It has occurred to me that many of our lovely friends are partial to a drink or eight two. I'd feel mean not supplying at least some alcohol. But putting money behind the bar at a wedding-type venue, no matter how reasonable, would cost a bit, wouldn't it? Let's see. 120 (adults) x £3 x 3 = £1080. Hmm. I wonder what they'd charge for corkage ...
Reckon DIY definitely wins as far as booze is concerned!

I'm like you, OP in that my main wish was to have as many friends and family there as possible, which was more important to me than traditional wedding trimmings.

We're hiring a barn and a field at a working dairy farm just outside our village. A local catering company is doing a BBQ which works out very reasonable, particularly since they are just providing the meats & BBQ food, friends and family are all making the salads and other accompaniments. We're having a capri tent marquee which are more affordable than standard clearspan or pole marquees. People are able to camp onsite if they like too.

We'll be having Pimms reception drinks as this works out much more affordable than champagne, and I've bought wine to accompany the meal in bulk from Ocado with their various discount vouchers. My favourite wine is Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc, it's usually around £9 a bottle, but I've managed to get it all for £4.49 a bottle. We're buying some barrels of cider form the local cider farm and friends are making homebrew, my BiL has promised elderflower fizz for the toasts.

I'm lucky to have talented frinds and family pitching in with decorations and my Mum and MiL are growing all of the spring flowers from bulbs and plugs. I'm making the cake myself.

It's part budget-friendly, part control freakery. I'd much rather source and orchestrate all this myself than leave it in the hands of a venue to whom I'd pay through the nose while it wouldn't be exactly what I want.

Do you have any old-build schools near you that hire out their dining hall/assembly rooms? They often have kitchens attached so you could perhaps have a local caterer provide food. Then you can also supply your own bar. Or have fish and chips delivered and hire an ice-cream van for puddings? Depends on the kind of wedding you want though really. Good luck with the planning and congratulations

If you had it at a school, you could also perhaps find out if the kitchen staff would be willing to help on the day. If you can get a Costco or Macro card you could buy finger-buffet items in bulk and get the kitchen staff to prepare and lay it all out for you perhaps?

The best and most enjoyable wedding I have ever been to was a really simple one.

Ceremony in church followed by reception in church hall.

The flowers - with permission and a very small payment ( £25 I think ) to a local farmer who had a field full of daffodils they collected enough to make bouquets and. To give one to each guest and decorate the church and hall.

The bride and bridesmaids wore daisy chains as head dresses.

The church hall was decorated with home made bunting.

Guests welcomed into church hall with a glass of pimms

Then everyone sat down to pots of tea and home made scones ( all made that morning by friends of the bride)and clotted cream. We had been told in advance what the plan was so we all made sure we had a full cooked breakfast late morning!

Evening buffet was prepared by loads of local friends who all brought something - the spread was amazing!

They also had musical friends who entertained us while we enjoyed the cream tea.

A folk band kept us dancing all night.

Very fond memories of that wedding and a lovely couple who made us feel very relaxed and welcome.

Ok. Ways we saved money:

Cheap booze from france

Friend made carrot cake for our dessert (as a gift to us)

Wedding cake made of cheese that was served in the evening so no extra buffet costs

Bridesmaids paid half for own dresses (all chose different styles they could re-wear)

Bridesmaids paid for own shoes

Got flowers from local farm and DM and DMIL arranged them for the tables/marquee the day before

Got church flower ladies to do church flowers

Table runners/scatter crystals/name tags/seating plan off Ebay

Didn't bother with favours. Just cheap crap that people leave behind.

Friends provided sound system and DJ'd for free

Cheap cars - local 'posh' cabs. Only went 5 mins round the corner and no one saw it anyway!

Hunted around to find a cheap photographer. Found an amazing one who was not a 'wedding photographer' as such - but took fab pics at a fraction of the price.

Ummm. I'll come back if I think of any more!

Oh and Prosecco instead of Champagne (I personally prefer it!)

Yes, prosecco or cava can be just as nice as champagne at a fraction of the price. And if you make bucks fizz it goes even further (and counts as one of your five a day ;) )

Ooh yes, definitely Cava or Prosecco! I love both

Some good tips here, great food for thought thanks

I found this thread interesting as I too am planning a very tight budget wedding. I have most things sorted through friends and making things myself, plus finding a wedding dress for £40 on ebay! Haha!
I was wondering about asking the local colleges for photography students to cut costs on photo's, I'm happy to print them myself.
The only bit I'm struggling on is finding a venue to get married at and having the party at after (to cut down on travel costs.) I'm happy to cater but I've not seen a venue that holds the wedding but doesn't cater. Anybody know anything?!