The market is flooded with books and guides about how to plan a wedding. These books are great if you have the money to spend on them, and you have an unlimited budget. If you are a bride that does not quite fit the traditional mold, or if you just like to do things your own way, you may want to make your own wedding planning book.
Wedding planning is not a complicated process, but it is time-consuming and requires you to wade through and process a great deal of information. Keeping the information organized and in one place is essential. Certain books on the market promise to help you with this task, but I found them to be expensive and not organized the way that I thought would be helpful to me. After being disappointed by commercial wedding planning books, I decided to make my own wedding planning book.
I took an ordinary three-ring binder and divided the binder into several sections. The sections are labeled in bright construction paper and tabbed. If you already have your theme picked for your wedding, you could even use your wedding colors. At the front of my binder, I made a section for my budget, where I kept a list of everything I wanted for the wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon and the total dollar amount I estimated each one would cost. At the top of the page, I put my wedding planning budget in big, bold numbers so that I would always have it in mind while shopping. I also kept notes in this section about when vendor payments would be due when I made the payments.
The next section in my wedding planning book was for contracts. Each time I made an agreement with a vendor for my wedding ceremony or reception I put a copy of the contract in the binder. If I made any changes to the contract, such as special requests or add-ons, I put the contract addendum into the contracts section. If a question came up about what was promised, I had an easy place to look in my wedding planning book.
The next sections in my binder were either for a particular vendor that I chose or ideas for items that I was still looking for. For instance, when I chose our reception site, I interviewed a number of vendors. For each vendor, I kept information in a section called “Reception.” When I chose a vendor, I added a new section under that vendor’s name with the different packages offered, the additional items offered by the site, and ideas for the options we were considering at the reception location.
I also had sections for florists, the rehearsal dinner, wedding party gifts, bridesmaid dresses, party favors, and invitations. As you plan for your wedding, you will get ideas for other items as well, like engraved flutes for your first toast, cake servers, ring pillows, candle pillars, and other odds and ends.
You may want to add your own sections for things you think are important. For instance, you can add pockets to keep cards of the vendors you are considering, extra pages to jot notes when you visit vendors, or pictures of the dresses, flowers, or cakes you see in magazines or while you are out shopping that you like. You can even take the book with you to bridal fairs to store your ideas in as you go. The beauty of being your own wedding planner and creating your own wedding planning book is that the options are limitless.
