Oh my god, my absolute favourite type of thread. First of all: congratulations. Hope you have a wonderful life together and good on you for starting off without a pile of debt to deal with...
DH and I had the most outrageously lavish wedding weekend. Seriously, beyond your most crazy imaginings. Most OTT wedding I've ever been to by a country mile and it still cost way way less than the average UK wedding. How we did it:
A dress from Debenhams looks just as amazing as one costing ten times as much. I know this for a fact, as several mates also went same route. Some of these are the wives of multimillionaires so you'd think they'd go designer but they didn't. You'd never know! The whole idea of having jimmy choos or whatever to go with it is total bollocks by the way. Seriously, who cares.
Get mates to do stuff - I had a friend do flowers and another did the invites. All our friends decorated the venue. (flowers in vases from ikea, tealights also courtesy of Ikea, bit of glitter on the tables (great fun for guests) and loads of petals. Which cost absolutely nothing. You could use white crepe paper to make streamers as well - cheap as chips. Fairy lights: magic.
Mum made the cake (not that anyone would ever care about such things, by the time you get to the cake in a good wedding, everyone's too full / pissed to care!)
We didn't book a wedding reception, we booked a restaurant with a bar (late licence) and didn't tell them it was a wedding until the last minute. The whole thing was done for a minimum spend, so in the end we didn't even hit the end of the free bar - a gift to our guests that just kept on giving!
No weddingy stuff - no party favours etc.
No DJ - we used an ipod. Much better!
No cars, no bridesmaids (well there were bridesmaids, my best mates, but they wore whatever they wanted so we didn't pay for that!), the ushers, best man etc also wore what they wanted.
So much stuff you agonise about is just old rubbish that literally NO ONE cares about. Wear something you like, go somewhere you like (our venue was the venue for one of our first dates), have only your closest friends and relatives there, keep them well fed and well watered and don't worry what anyone else thinks. It's your day.
Having said that, I do think hiring a photographer (an amazing one, the best you can afford) is a good idea if you can. My DH was allocated photographic duties at one wedding we went to and there was something wrong with his camera - all the exposure was set wrong. Nightmare!
Hope you have an amazing day.