I am so fortunate to have been happily married to my lovely husband for almost 9 years. We had a lovely church wedding in my home county of Northumberland, followed by a reception in a beautiful venue in Newcastle city centre. I have great memories of the day, but even so, there a few things I might have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.
Get the venue sorted first
My experience was that almost every thing was reasonably easy to source – a lovely dress, flowers, a band…. but one thing that is in short supply during peak wedding season is wedding venues. I wouldn’t even begin to think about any other aspect of your big day until you lock in your venue – on Saturdays, popular wedding venues can be booked up years in advance. We fell in love with our chosen venue so had to compromise on getting married on a Friday, which I felt a bit guilty about at the time. We also wasted time viewing venues that I knew in my gut wouldn’t be right for us, but I felt I had to view as many as possible, just in case. It turns out that we knew instantly upon walking into the venue that we eventually chose that we had to have our reception there. So with hindsight, I would have spent more time researching and less time making appointments to view places.
Find out what style of dress suits your figure
When you find a good wedding dress shop, weekend appointments (which are the only appointments you can attend when you work 9-5 Monday to Friday) are like gold dust… you will often find yourself waiting weeks for one. I found that every style of dress I tried on looked lovely, which made me so confused about what I actually really wanted. Let’s face it, the job of wedding dress boutiques is to sell you an expensive dress so they will do everything it takes to make you look lovely. A-line, fishtail, princess, strapless, vintage, ivory, champagne… there are so many styles and shades to choose from. What I would suggest is before you make any appointments, head to the high street and try on a multitude of styles of dress to figure out what suits you the best. That way, when you finally set foot in a wedding dress shop, you can focus your search a bit better instead of being overwhelmed by all the options.
Outsource where you can
If you are as fortunate as we were, you will have family and friends offering to help out when you are planning your wedding. Once you’ve figured out what is really important to you (for us, this included the food, the drink and the wedding band) and what doesn’t matter so much (the table centrepieces and the cake weren’t so important to us) then I strongly suggest you take advantage of this help. My husband’s lovely mother and gran offered to sort the cake for us – I trusted them to do a wonderful job and they did. I was happy to hand over the reins to them as it gave me one less thing to worry about.
This post was a collaboration with confetti.co.uk