Month Two: Wedding Planning with Maddie

This is the fourth post in a new series about me, a professional wedding planner, planning my own wedding. If you’ve been following along on the blog, or on Instagram, you know that back in March, I got engaged to the most amazing man that I know! It has been a very busy and exciting last few months. In my last engagement post, I also announced a new blog series to share my own personal wedding planning process and decisions along the way. It's one thing to be a wedding planner planning other people's weddings, but when it comes to my own wedding, people have had so many questions. “Is it more stressful,” yes. “Is it going to be a huge wedding,” not really. “I bet it's already planned and finished, right?”, not even close.” But the question I get asked the most is, “What have you done since getting engaged?” To answer all of your questions and help you know what to do when you get engaged, here is what I did the first month of being engaged:

Photography by Joy and Light Photography.

This post may include affiliate links. Disclaimer.

1. Research Vendors

Researching vendors can be a lot of fun, but it can also be very stressful. When researching vendors, I was checking 3 things: Budget, Reviews, Style. It is very important to keep our budget in mind. There are lots of vendors at varying price ranges offering similar services. Be sure you are sticking to the budget that you and your fiancé agreed on. If your dream vendor is out of your budget, you may have to have a conversation about adjusting your budget. If there is no wiggle room in your budget, you may need to find another vendor who does similar work in your price range. Next is reviews. I spent so much time reading reviews of different vendors, even ones I have worked with in the past. They may provide a great service, but be terrible at communicating. This could make working with them stressful, and you can easily avoid this by reading the reviews. I did a lot of research and found the top vendors that fit within our budget, and had good reviews. Next was comparing their styles of work. For our wedding, we are wanting light, natural, and earthy colors. When looking for rentals and photographers, this became a key factor when deciding on who to book with. I cannot wait to share all of our amazing team of vendors and their work with you all soon.

2. Start Guest List

I’m going to be honest with you, making your guest list is not fun. I was constantly worried we were forgetting someone, or that someone was going to be offended if they were not invited. We found ourselves categorizing our friends and ranking them by priority. We also faced the issue of deciding how many people each of us got to invite. Were we going to invite the same amount of people and split it evenly? This was difficult because Nick has a much larger family than I do so his family took up a lot of his guests, and he barely had any more spots available for his friends. We were so tired of looking at lists of names and wanted this to be over. 

We finally decided that our families had to be invited and they were our top priority. We put them at the top of the list, and split the remaining guests evenly. This allowed Nick to invite more of his friends, while still keeping things fairly equal. Our venue gave us a pretty strict maximum capacity for the event so we decided to make a B list. This live all of these people and still want them at our wedding, but have a limited capacity to abide by. Once we receive our first RSVPs and find out that some of the A list guests are unable to attend, we will be extending invitations to our B list. That way we can maximize our capacity and have all of our favorite people at our wedding.

3. Pick Bridesmaid Dresses

The next step towards planning our wedding was picking the attire for our bridal party. There are so many new companies that sell and rent bridesmaid dresses and suits. When picking the bridesmaid dresses and groomsmen suits, ordering samples from online stores was the easiest way to decide which colors and companies to use. Most companies will send you free samples of their fabrics to help you match your bridesmaid dresses. I ordered samples from Azazie, Bridy Grey, Dear Cleo, and David’s Bridal. When deciding on which company to get our dresses from, I considered the following: colors, fabric types, dress styles, and price range. I will share a more in-depth post about each of the companies and explain why we chose Azazie for our bridesmaid dresses.

4. Book Photographer and Schedule Engagement Session

Photography was the most important thing for me when planning our wedding. Once our wedding day is over, we will have the photos to appreciate and relive the moment. Everything else is fleeting or perishable. I spent a lot of time researching different photographers. Looking at their packages, prices, and previous galleries. Nick and I are wanting to have a very natural, light, and modern wedding. I looked for these same aspects when comparing photographers and found Joy and Light Photography. 

Diana, owner and photographer of Joy and Light Photography is such a joy to work with. Her package included both our wedding day photos, and our engagement session. During our second month of planning, we scheduled our engagement session with Diana at Tanyard Creek in Bella Vista. It was super hot outside, but Diana was so kind and made us feel so comfortable in front of the camera. We are so looking forward to having her photograph our wedding.

5. Venue Tours

Before we could do much more planning, we had to find a venue. Without a venue, there could be no wedding. When we were looking for our venue we kept our design theme in mind. We were looking for natural and outdoor venues. We came up with a few options: The Buffalo River, The Garden Room, and The Nest at Prairie Creek. We loved the idea of getting married at The Buffalo River, but there are limited vendors in the Buffalo River area and delivery fees from Northwest Arkansas were going to blow out our budget. Next was the Garden Room on Dickson Street. We loved the Garden Rooms location, and its indoor and outdoor space, but the thing we liked the most about the Garden Room was the in house catering and rental items. Finding a venue that has an all inclusive option is hard to come by, and will save you a lot of money and time. Unfortunately, The Garden Room was unavailable on our preferred date. We ended up touring the Nest at Prairie Creek next in Rogers, Arkansas. The Nest at Prairie Creek has a beautiful cottage, clear tent, multiple layered decks, and a creek that runs through the property. This was the perfect venue for us, and Nick absolutely loved it. 

This has been a very exciting time of our lives full of family, friends, and anticipation for the next phase of our lives to start together. This was just the second month, and there are still so many decisions for us to make before the big day comes. Subscribe below to get a reminder for next week’s post about what else we’ve been up to. If you have any questions about wedding planning and how I’m planning my own wedding, leave a comment below.

Cheers!