Weekly Wedding Words: What will go wrong

As every Bride goes along planning her outdoor wedding, in the back of her mind, there is the terrifying thought about “what if it rains?” To be honest, it is reckless to not have a plan B.  I am at the point of my wedding planning process where the plan A is well laid and falling into place, but now what about plan B? Aside from the Weather, there are some other likely things that will go wrong during your wedding planning process. Consider this your guide on how to deal and a formal warning of what to expect.

1. Weather and plan B

As I mentioned the need for a plan B for any part of an outdoor wedding is a must. Even if you are only planning to have a quick outdoor ceremony, there has to be a plan for “Just in case”. I struggle with this to be honest, I like so many Brides, am in love with my ceremony location and I can’t imagine not getting married there. Facts is, that I have to get over it. I am getting married in October and the weather could turn to a hurricane in a matter of hours. If you find yourself here, I recommended working closely with your planner or day of and the venue. Is there another space you could go? If that space is your reception space, how do we flip the space in a small amount of time? Think through it, pretend its your day and imagine all the elements you have planned for your ceremony and how can they be used somewhere else in the event of weather? Getting with your planner and venue well before hand also eliminates the panic on the day of. Your planner will know what you want and what is supposed to happen when this or that happens and she won’t be in your face asking you a million questions while guests are starting to arrive. Name of the game “Eliminate panic!”

2.Committing to things too soon

I can’t talk about this enough! When you are freshly engaged there is a time when all you want to do is buy and plan. You finally feel at home in the wedding aisle of Hobby Lobby and can convince yourself you need this and that before you have even picked a venue. Even the seemingly obvious things like candles, “every wedding needs candles” you’ll say to yourself and then come to find you pick a venue that only allows flameless candles and now you have 6 dozen tea light candles that are outside the 30 day return policy. So word to the wise, wait! Slow down, there is an order to these things and the egg cannot come before the chicken. This also goes for vendors, do not feel like you need to book the first venue, photographer and photo booth you see on the Knot.

3. Letting details fall to the back burner

There comes a time in the planning when you kind of takes a break accidently, this could be because of the holiday, there could be a death or someone sick in the family, for whatever reason, it may be the wedding planning gets placed on the back burner. This is perfectly normal, problems can come if this “break” happens too early in the planning, you are communicating with your vendors and things become a scramble at the end. Try and create a month by month checklist so everything is broken down, try and schedule things with hard deadlines, like final payments a few weeks before the due date. Worst case, you have it ready to go early and are just waiting. I can not tell you how many couples I have seen panicking in those last two weeks over small details that had fallen through the cracks, you are not alone it happens to the best of us. The goal here just get organized from the get go.

4. Not enough communication

When it comes time to make the timeline and put everything together, take this time to communicate with vendors. If you are planning a wedding in the fall, keep in mind sunset. So when you go to pick your ceremony time, get with your photographer and see what and when they would recommend. If you are planning to do a special type of exit let them know that to, that way they are there and fully ready to capture your moments. When planning dishes and utensils, talk to your caterer, do they have dishes that can be rented? What types of serving dishes are included in the packages, or if you have a tight clean up time and all dishes need to be accounted for, give your caterer and day of a heads up so they can plan.

As a planner, I would rather my bride remind me 6 times about something then wait until the week of to tell me.

5. Overspending

I am guilty of it for sure. I will say honestly that going over a wedding budget is very easy. Often times brides are walking into unchartered waters when coming into the wedding world. People always say to set the budget first but before that, you really need to list out the things you want and get some sort of price estimate, have a ball park in mind for your budget but setting a budget too firm from the beginning to setting up for failure. The wedding industry is severely overpriced, not to say that the vendors don work for every penny, because they do. Food is expensive, paper is expensive, gifts for the party is expensive, it all adds up very quickly. My advice here is be realistic, don’t say you want a 150 size wedding and then budget for a 75 person wedding because you didn’t know how much things cost.

-ML