If you’ve just begun your wedding planning and have even opened a bridal magazine you’re probably under the assumption that you’d best plan on being engaged for at least a year. There are only two reasons you should wait–a) your dead-set on the ceremony site and it’s booked out a year and b) your dead-set on a reception site and it’s booked out a year.
There are so many different options now for venues that if you are flexible on the time of year and whether or not you can do a Friday or a Sunday wedding, you can definitely do it in less than a year.
Prioritize. I booked an October wedding in July. No vendors had yet been selected. Because we were in a time crunch, one of the first things my bride and I sat down to discuss was what was most important to her. Besides the food and the wedding date she’d wanted great pictures.
Pick up a bridal magazine and flip through it cover to cover so you know everything that’s involved in a wedding. Now that you have the idea in your head, write down everything that’s important to you. Don’t leave anything out–that includes the date of the wedding! Have alternate dates available so that if the photographer you love is booked and you absolutely have to have her, go to your back-up date. Do this too for your ceremony site and your reception site: in order of importance.
If you have the funds, hire a wedding planner to do the search and recommendations for you. Most planners either have budgeting packages available that provide you with vendor referrals based on your budget and your needs or can provide you with a list of recommended vendors for a flat fee. Even if you picked a planner’s brain for a couple hours (or whatever their minimum is) you’d be much farther along than when you started. We do this for a living; you’re doing this once.
My bride was fabulous and was flexible with the ceremony site and the reception site but was set on October 6th as the date. Fall weddings are extremely popular so her date was already booked at most non-denominational ceremony sites in the Chicago suburbs. But with a little imagination we were able to locate a gorgeous little chapel in a forest preserve of Oak Brook, Illinois.
When searching for venues, ASK EVERYONE! Ask any vendor you interview for recommendations. They have dozens of contacts and their contacts have contacts, etc. Think of the unexpected. When searching for a ceremony site, take into consideration the time of year. Because my bride’s date was early Fall in Illinois, we knew the weather was going to be fairly warm with the possibility of rain. An indoor setting suited her needs and because the chapel is nestled in a forest preserve near a beautiful lake, it doubled as the backdrop for her portraits.
When’s the date? Even if the date you want is available, do not hesitate to put a hold on it. Most venues will do a courtesy hold for 24 hrs and will notify you if another interested party has requested the same date. If you are remotely interested in the site–hold it.
The same goes for your reception site. My bride had a small guest list of sixty people. And she had made clear from the beginning that they were very foodsie people so the menu had to be extraordinary. No standard wedding fare allowed. Tip: Know your style! If you know going in that you have a guest list of 250 don’t look at restaurants that have private dinning for 180. You are wasting valuable search time and your ideal place could be snatched up while you’re at the wrong venue. Have a list of priorities for your reception site (and your ceremony site, for that matter) and begin your search using that criteria.
Once you have the ceremony and reception sites locked, the rest is cake. If you are planning a wedding in a short amount of time, try to get your reception site to multitask for you. We had the reception venue, Entourage Restaurant in Schaumburg, do the favors–milk and cookies–so that we had one less thing to worry about. They also included the cake (which most reception sites do nowadays) so that was another worry off our plate. Another tip: keep the decor in mind when selecting the venue. The less you have to do to beautify the place or customize to your liking, the better. Keep the amount of things that you do for the wedding down to the absolute essentials. Do not waste time with crafts and putting together favors.
INVITATIONS. Because your wedding date is so near, you don’t have the luxury of a save-the-date notice so don’t bother (and it’s a waste of money). Spread the word by mouth or email instead. You’ll need to send out invitations almost immediately. This is why it’s imperative to get your date, ceremony site and reception site nailed down. When you’re ready to order the invitations, go with a retailer who has rush shipping available. We used notfromabox.com, which not only has very cute stuff but was able to turn around the printing very quickly and ship it out before the six-week mark.
Create TO-DO lists. And stick to them like mad. Most of the online ones (and even the ones in the wedding organizers) are timelines for wedding dates out a year or longer. Adjust them easily by crunching everything from 12mos to up to 3 mos. all into your 3-month-out checklist. For me, it was putting everything out from a year to July all in the July checklist. Expect the first month to be completely ridiculous. To ease the insanity, book your vendor visits by the week and stick to it: first week is ceremony/reception and bridal gown, second week photographers and videographers and jewelers, third week florists and bakers, forth week music and limos. And whoever else is left that you might need.
Planning a wedding in such a short amount of time also means you don’t have the luxury of spacing out payments. So if this is a problem for you, you might need to rethink the wedding date. Most vendors require full or half payment if you book your wedding one to two months out. Which brings me to my second-to-last point: time management. Read my other article on AC about creating a wedding organizer.
If you’ve done this right, the last month before the wedding should run the same as if you’d been planning for a year. Take a breath. Your vendors will all be accounted for, your payments will be up-to-date and your rsvp’s will be rolling in.
One last thing. Invest in a “day of” wedding planner. Most wedding planners offer this as a package or can work something up for you. Try to book one as soon as possible. Trust me when I tell you you’ll need one. Especially planning a wedding in less than a year. You’re new husband will thank you.
