to ask for help with wedding planning?

[NearlyMrsCustardsHardHat]

Our wedding is booked for next year and this year is going to be manic with planning etc currently suppliers are quoting 2013 prices at a huge mark up from 2011 and 2012 and the registrar fees aren't even avaliable yet although this years are just under £400 so i'd assume we're looking at nearer £450 for next year :(

We're pulling in favours, at cost, for flowers, makeup, cake and music, family are paying for my dress and the bridesmaids dresses, our wedding venue is one of the cheapest in the area (although they stipulate you MUST use one of their set caterers whose prices are all much of a muchness), we're keeping the guest list to 50 for the ceremony and meal and 80 for the evening so it's not huge, only one car is being hired, and all this is is without the rings, photographer, invites etc.

I'm getting really downhearted that we won't get the wedding we want (which isn't much as it is) without winning the lottery :(

AIBU to a) ask if it's possible to do all of the above for under £10k (I can't get the sums to do it) and b) for your tips and advice please.

Oh as for what we are doing.

Midweek wedding
Semi-pro photographer (£950 all in which includes album and a disc including rights to reproduce the images and her pictures are simply phenomenal)
Catering for 1/3 the numbers in the evening as we're having a late wedding so late meal they won't want more food at night it'll simply be for the extra 20-30 guests to have a bit of munch
Family and friends, as already mentioned, are providing a lot of the sundry items and we're lucky the venue doesn't need flowers in the way a church would.

Oh and we had a served buffet rather than a waitressed sit down which is just as nice, gets around people's dietary requirements and is way cheaper due to needing fewer waiting staff.

Oh try here for dresses www.swoonWeddinggowns.co.uk

Those dresses are GREAT OP!!!

Seriously, I'm super judgey/picky and you've astounded me with those.

Thanks vivi they're something special aren't they :o sadly cost over £2k each so need to go looking elsewhere or get a dressmaker to make one for me!

Oh love the link thanks myncichips

are you anywhere near lincoln?

go to this place for 1940's lace numbers .... tasty vintage bridal

something like this?

and the mantilla veil on the first picture can be ordered off ebay from hong kong for peanuts looky here That's what i did and the veil was beautiful. Beware, order in plenty of time though, mine took 4 months to arrive. worth the wait though definately made my outfit

Oooh, such pretty dresses! I love weddings. :)

We saved a lot on catering by having a later meal and only doing hors d'eouvres. drinks, and cake. Everyone loved it and we had a ton of delicious food, but it was cheaper as it wasn't a whole meal.

Also one of our biggest savers was the centerpieces...we got a lot of copper platters/chargers and then bought out all the plain white candles in all the dollar stores around town. They looked gorgeous.

I like the idea of one later meal for everyone

Amazing dresses OP. Desperately want to do my wedding again now, so many brilliant ideas on this thread. Hope things work out well for you.

I cant recommend the one meal idea enough. It was so much cheaper than a sit down for a smaller number and then a buffet for the rest and it meant that we didnt have to split the list into day v evening.

OP bear in mind that although you have fed your day guests, some will eat an evening buffet anyway just because its there. My sisters evening buffet ran out of food before alot of the evening guests had eaten because many of the day guests chowed down, despite have a 5 course meal on 3 hours before :(

despite having had a 5 course meals only 3 hours before

I have just been on an absolute AIBU mission to find your thread as I saw it a couple of days ago and really wanted to post but was in a hurry at the time!

Me and DH got married at the end of December. We had 65 people attend the day and an additional 60 in the evening. We would have liked to hade had them all with us all day but unfortunately we only had limited seats in the registry office! We spent around £4500 and called in a lot of favours. Not everyone on MN will agree with all of this but this us what we did...

We got married on a Wednesday. This immediately reduced the price of the hall that we booked for the reception and the hotel we stayed in for our wedding night. We managed to book a luxury hotel to spend our wedding night in for £50! After I had paid over the phone, I mentioned that it was our wedding night and they upgraded us to a £200 suite for the night and threw in free room service!

I bought my dress from the Very catalogue. It was their mist expensive one and with the 10% new customer discount it cost me under £250. I ordered party dresses for my 3 adult bridesmaids, shoes for myself, trousers for the pageboys, dresses for the two flowergirls and gifts for my bridesmaids, my mum, my grandma and DH's mum all at the same time. Got the 10% discount across the lot then settled the account in full when the statement came in. My shoes were reduced in their sale and so were the bridesmaids dresses that were just pink party dresses that cost just £27 each before discount. Even better they can wear them again at a later date.

I picked up shoes for my bridesmaids for £6 per pair in the New Look online sale and ballet-style slippers and little bolero cardigans for the flowergirls from Primark.

I then turned to EBay which was the most amazing resource ever. I got personalised money boxes for the flowergirls and pageboys as gifts, cufflinks for all the men involved as gifts (bought from different sellers and all chosen to be in some way meaningful to the man in question), my bouquet, bridesmaids bouquets, button holes for the men, satin bolero jackets for the bridesmaids, ribbons to decorate cars, a faux fur bolero for me and my garter. These all cost me between £1 and £15. I made sure I always got the best price possible by using "best offer" and also looking for auctions that finished in the early hours of the morning when people were less likely to bid. DH thought I was bad when my alarm clock was going off at 5am and I was heading for the laptop but it was so worth it to get the bargains! One thing I really wanted was a personalised cake topper and these were going for up to £150. I won one for £29 + postage by bidding on one that ended at 3.35am!

My cake was one large fruit cake with two sponge cakes on top that I bought from Asda and wrapped ribbon round to match my colour scheme.

We held the ceremony at 3.30pm in our local registry office. This meant that everybody had eaten lunch before hand and we could get away with serving a lighter meal straight afterwards. We booked a local sports and social club for the reception with a cash bar and used a friend's cash and carry card to buy all the stuff to serve up bacon rolls and luxurious hot chocolate straight after the ceremony. A couple of willing friends cooked it all for us and we got 65 mugs to serve hot chocolate in for £20 from a local charity shop with a promise that we would return them afterwards so they could sell them again!

We hired male suiting from a company called Formally Yours (you'll have to google them as I can't link from my phone) for £60 per tailcoat suit including insurance. They were really helpful with working out sizes etc and delivered in plenty of time to change the couple of things that didn't fit. I managed to negotiate hire of the suits for the two pageboys for free (waistcoat, cravat, shirt and hanky).

We had two friends with Jags that we used as wedding cars and I bought a load of men's ties from EBay in a colour to match the cravats so that all the men involved (fathers, brothers, chauffeurs, close friends etc) all felt like they fitted in!

A friend of mine is a DJ so he played our reception but if you don't know anybody I would suggest asking round friends who have older teenage DCs as they may know somebody or contacting your local hospital radio station who will probably have a plethora of DJs who would gladly help in exchange for a donation to the station.

For me the photographer was the one thing that was really important to me as I wanted to make sure we had good photos for the memories. By haggling I managed to get two photographers to cover 12 hours for £1000 and having just got the photos back I must say they were worth every penny.

My hairdresser was a student from the local college and she charged £20 per person as long as I asked the photographer to take some good photos of the hairstyles that she could use in her portfolio. I bought hair accessories (flowers and decorative hairpins) from Claire's, Tesco and Wilkinsons(!). We did our own makeup following a lesson from one of the makeup counters at Boots!

I got shoes for the men from a shoe shop that was closing down. They cost me £4 per pair. Identical shoes for the pageboys were the same price from Primark!

For my evening buffet I gave a couple of friends £300 and a cash and carry card. They did me proud with a retro 1980's child's party style buffet and the amount of food they produced would have fed us all 3 times over!

For the toasts, our venue wanted £15 per bottle of champagne. We bought £2 bottles of Bucks Fizz from Asda and swallowed the £5 per bottle corkage charge. We hired champagne glasses from Waitrose who only charge you for any breakages!

For save the dates we ordered fridge magnets that we had designed ourselves from VistaPrint. We also used them for all our invites, day and evening. The secret is to create an account, design what you want, put it in your basket but then DON'T CHECK OUT! Within hours they will start sending you emails offering you the same stuff cheaper and cheaper. Hold out for at least 10 days if you can before you go back and buy at the discounted price!

To decorate our venue we hired a helium canister and bought balloons from the local party shop, along with some naice disposable tablecloths from Waitrose. It gave the boys something to do on the morning of the wedding whilst the girls were making ourselves beautiful!

And, importantly for me, with all the savings I made I was able to afford the mobile casino I so desperately wanted for my reception. This was possibly the bravest and most nerve-wracking thing I did as I decided which company I wanted to use, obtained a price, haggled the price down as it was mid-week then told them I didn't want it as I couldn't afford it. Two weeks before the wedding I went back to them and basically said "this is how much wedding budget I have left and I will boom you if you'll do it for this price.". Thankfully they said yes and I got them for a third of the original price!

We didn't ask for any gifts as we felt we had already called in enough favours. However our friends surprised us by presenting us with the honeymoon we never thought we'd afford and spending money at the end of the speeches! They'd been secretly planning it for weeks and, whilst it was only a few days away in this country, the fact that they'd made the effort to organise the whip round and arrange it all meant the absolute world to us! One of them even drove us there the next day and brought us home again so that they could give us more spends rather than use the money for train tickets.

Sorry if I have waffled but I Loved my wedding so much and I truly believe that it is possible for anybody to get married in a way they will be thrilled with on whatever budget they have! There is more that I'd like to tell you but sone things were very unique to me and DH and would almost certainly "out me" if I shared them on here. Feel free to PM me and I will gladly share all my contacts and more details with you or anyone else who wants them!

We spent 6 months planning and I can honestly say our wedding was everything we wanted and more. Your priorities may be totally different to ours (we wanted a low key ceremony and a massive party afterwards as we really felt that the ceremony was just about formalising what we and everybody else already knew, and the big party afterwards was what we viewed as a celebration of our Love and all the people that have shared the journey of the last 6 years with us and who we Love so dearly which was the important part for us) but with patience and the backing of some supportive family members, friends or MNers I'm sure you can have a wedding that will be perfect for you

Sorry for the marathon message. Just realised I waffle a lot after

I agree very nice dresses but they are expensive. I think it is realistic to do it within 10,000 if you are getting a lot of favours from friends.

I think you should be able to get a similar style dress for less. My dress was a maggie soterr o . They are divine. They have lots of choice and do have some vintage style ones. Mine cost about a thousand. Also you could try looking at sale dresses . I think bridal shops have them after the summer.

Can you do a breakdown of costs then maybe we could help you get within budget .?

Yes you can do it. We can give loads of advice but it wil be more helpful to be a bit more specific iyswim.

Venue/catering - if you are set on this place then if you have haggled as much as you can Inc getting more stiff include in the price then deduct it and get over it. Catering, get some samples from them, who will you get more from? Can you serve cake as desert to help reduce price?

Weddings can be as expensive as you want, there is always a more expensive version. For eg I wanted little boxes for my favours with chocs in, I bought tge boxes from eBay, the bows from another site, tge chocs from another and some tissues paper. I made tge boxes up whilst watching tv and my parents and I filled them one afternoon. The price compared to tge ready made version and or stuff was stupid something like a quarter of the price.

What have you got left to organise and what is done, tge prioritse and make sure your dp and parents are pulling their weight. You need to delegate. I made sure we had regular wedding meetings so tgat way it was all together and everyone knew what they were doing and no it was as bridezilla as it sounds.

I used a website called hitched.co.uk there were loads of tips plus you could people use it to offer discounts to customers too. I found a fab localish woman who made my cake, even sent me a taster cake first! Plus every shared their tips. I used vistaprint for my save the date magnets just cost postage.

You can do it, it might take more effort but it can be done but there might be some compromise.

So what is it you want tgat you don't think you can afford? Challenge us. Go to a wedding website and challenge them. Peopke on tge Internet are strange they love finding things for other peopke

Ps an invite would be great

Those dresses are beautiful. Have you tried any dresses on yet? What is the budget for the dress? Get yourself down to some dress shops and try stuff on. Take the pictures with you and show them what you are looking for (although I think lots if people end up with something different). For some places esp on a sat you will need an appt so phone ahead and check. Does and you you know recommend a dress maker? Check wedding website for your area and if anyone has used them. Try a variety of different shops plus if you do decide to go second hand Oxfam do wedding dresses but only in a few shops find your local one. BHS do a wedding range tgat is really good get there as soon as it's out because it has limited stock. A monsoon dress is another cheaper option.

It is doable.

If you're having a DJ be warned that a lot of them will add £200 - £300 the minute you say its for a wedding. Test the water by asking them to quote for it as a 30th birthday or something first. If you're in or near Kent I can recommend a fantastic DJ for under £200.

I realise you already have a photographer, but I went to a wedding last summer where every guest was given a disposable camera, and asked to take as many photo's as possible, and we all put them in a box at the end.....some of the photos were fantastic, and the bride and groom said that they saw much more of their wedding afterwards than they did on the day. I thought it was quite a good idea!

We had the wedding we wanted for £6k, but that was 10 years ago (the hire of the village hall has gone up 100% since then, but still cheap at £20 per hour!).

I admit it took a LOT of graft on our part. I didn't have a fancy car, I didn my own make-up. The things that could go, went.

The best wedding pictures I have ever seen weren't professional. We got two friends with decent cameras to be 'on call' throughout the day, paid them in alcohol (and a nice gifty) and one had black and white film (god I'm old) and one had colour. We put disposable cameras on each table (big tables to cut the cost of centre pieces etc.,) and the results are fantastic.

Call on creative friends.

Like I say we had our reception in the local village hall. Its not posh. We spent 24hrs decorating it. I bought a load of bargain Muslin, flung some fairy lights around, and stripped a friend's house of ivy. Again, the results were more hired in marquee than village hall.

Good luck. Approach it like a job. Fortunately I had experience in events organising, but am not qualified (nor was I very good at it). Plan plan plan. Step back a lot, tackle one thing at a time. Budget well. You will have the wedding of your dreams, even if its a little shabbier in reality!

I wouldn't bother with a wedding car, either hire a black cab, or if you have friends/family with a posh car, see if they can 'chauffeur' you.

Buffet is better than sit-down meal IMO. More choice that way (whatever you choose for the sit-down meal, there's sure to be someone who doesn't like it ), guests get to mingle as they choose rather than sitting awkwardly with people they might not want to, and it can work out much, much cheaper. Wedding cake as dessert is fine IMO, who really needs dessert and cake, and there's always far too much cake left over.

For bridesmaids, normal party/evening dresses will often be cheaper than anything specifically labelled as 'bridesmaid dresses' - and will probably be nicer too! So many bridesmaid dresses are horrible and unflattering, and cost a fortune!

Live music is very nice if you can afford it. Wouldn't bother with a DJ though, iPod playlist would do for me.

I do think a good photographer is worth paying for, unless you have a friend who you trust to do a good/professional job. Same for getting hair done (and makeup if you wear it), just reduces the stress of it going wrong on the day!

This thread is making me in a big way.

I Love DP
I Love weddings
I Love planning events

Oh and friends of ours had elderflower cordial for the toast instead of champagne, I imagine that worked out a lot cheaper. Though many of the guests were not drinkers anyway, so there would have been a lot of polite pretending to sip the champagne, which would have been a bit of a waste :)

You could use a cheaper sparkling wine though, there's no rule that it has to be champagne unless you want.

If you are set on not changing the venue, these are the options I would try and consider (if the venue will let you)

• Fizz for toasts - will they offer prosecco instead of champagne? We are having prosecco for when guests arrive and lots of friends have commented that they prefer it to champagne anyway!

• Drop a course from the meal - will the caterers let you have main course/dessert or starter/main only? I suggested not having dessert to my OH as a money saver, and serving the cake as dessert, but he wanted a proper pudding as well as wedding cake greedy pig so we are having both.

• We are having a photographer only up to the middle of the day, not staying for the evening, and not paying for a formal photo album, we'll just make an album ourselves with the pictures we like. (photographer is still over £1k though, but I did really love their pictures more than any others I looked at).

• Having a plain black cab rather than a fancy vintage car - I don't even want ribbons or any of that faff on it, that stuff to me is just unnecessary window-dressing.

• No DJ - we are just going to plug in an iPod with our own playlists of songs we love. Means we get no YMCA and other cringey disco songs, apart from the ones we happen to like!

• Am very lucky that my MiL is doing my flowers and mum made my favours, but I would have done without favours if I'd had to. I do love fresh flowers, though, so that's one luxury I would always choose over other things.

• Our invites came from Zazzle and cost around £50, about the same as others are quoting for Vistaprint. We are also going to do print-your-own menu cards which you can order from Confetti.

Good luck! You are right that the catering is the single hardest thing to save money on, but you might still be able to cut a few corners there...

My wedding dress was sold as a bridesmaid dress, but I had it made in ivory. Quite a simple design, which I was happy with. Cost £120

Bridesmaids wore party dresses from Debenhams £12 each. The dresses weren't especially fancy, but they looked smarter because they matched

Hog roast, not sit down meal

Make your own invitations

Prosecco not champagne.

I wouldn't bother with favours