Weddings, I was told before I had my own, can be a lot of work. What’s more, all of the work that goes into them is fast forgotten, as the day flies by in a just a few often hazy hours. Your wedding is something that you sort of want to get right the first time, as ideally you’ll only be exchanging wedding rings with someone once!
So it was with a little bit of trepidation that my wife and I began to plan our big day. And as it happened, it couldn’t have turned out better! Not just the wedding planning and execution, but the honeymoon as well (we booked some Daintree rainforest accommodation, but I’ll get to that later).
So how did we do it? Read on.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I think it’s important to say that we weren’t looking to go overboard with our budget. We were looking at inviting a touch over a hundred people, but hoping to spend under $300 per head. A budget of $30,000 was set, and we managed to work comfortably within that.
In the weeks leading up to the big day, the wedding planning seemed never-ending. One of the best decisions we made was with the simple investment of a three-ringed binder, which held all of the quotes, contacts and correspondences that we’d collected. We tabulated everything in what became known as ‘the bible’ under a range of different categories, like ‘venue’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘food & drink’. This made finding the right info a breeze – we found it even easier than storing everything on email.
The venue
One of the first things that we (and most likely you) had to get organised was the venue. You obviously can’t set a firm date before you’ve locked in a nice place for the action to happen, so the hunt was on fairly shortly after the engagement.
We got somewhat lucky, finding that a spot had just opened up on a usually booked-out estate in the south of Sydney. The estate could provide both a garden wedding and the reception, meaning our guests didn’t have to worry about going anywhere for the entire day.
A few months out from the big day we started to think about fitting out the reception space. It became very obvious very quickly that my soon-to-be wife and I weren’t exactly dab hands at interior design. Both of our heads hurt after a half an hour’s worth of browsing Pinterest for wedding decoration ideas, so we started to look for other options. And boy did we get lucky.
We got somewhat lucky, finding that a spot had just opened up on a usually booked-out estate in the south of Sydney. The estate could provide both a garden wedding and the reception, meaning our guests didn’t have to worry about going anywhere for the entire day.
A few months out from the big day we started to think about fitting out the reception space. It became very obvious very quickly that my soon-to-be wife and I weren’t exactly dab hands at interior design. Both of our heads hurt after a half an hour’s worth of browsing Pinterest for wedding decoration ideas, so we started to look for other options. And boy did we get lucky.
Hiring furniture is the best. Thankfully (and I didn’t know this until I had the need to), options for wedding furniture hire in Sydney are plentiful. Before stumbling across a furniture hire company, I was presuming that we’d have to cobble together a heap of tables and chairs from the local RSL, and drape white tablecloths over them to make them look half-decent. I was imagining hours of hard manual labour, resulting in a particularly stiff back on my big day. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Our wedding furniture hire company did everything. They gave us expert design advice to make the space looking absolutely stunning, they delivered and set up all of the furniture, they took all the furniture away the next day, and they did all this at a surprisingly thrifty rate. Obviously it was more expensive than the old RSL trestle tables would’ve been, but the quality of the furniture, coupled with the fact that we were freed up to concentrate on other things, made wedding furniture hire one of the best decisions we made.
The food & drink
Be prepared, wedding food can be ridiculously expensive. You may presume that some simple entrées and a nice piece of red meat for your guests would cost you what it might in a pub ($30-$40) but no, no, no, it does not. A basic food package can comfortably hit the $100 mark per head, which will quickly eat into your budget. We also had the extra pressure of having to keep our guests fed in between the ceremony and reception, which is a period that many weddings don’t have to bother with.
Drinks, however, were a little bit better. Thankfully our venue was fine with us supplying our own drinks, which lead to months and months of scanning liquor specials, striking when the price was right. We decided to keep the options minimal, with 3 types of beer (heavy international, heavy local, and a mid-strength) and 3 types of wine (red, white and bubbles) which helped in a couple of situations where large bulk amounts scored us nice discounts. |
Entertainment
We wanted our wedding to have an X-factor, and both of us being big music lovers, we opted to make a statement with our band. We also wanted our guests to get dancing as early as possible, so good tunes would certainly help with that!
We hired a band that was formed out of a collective – a concept I hadn’t really heard of before. Basically, you get to build your own band. You choose however many band members you like, who play whatever instruments you like, and the cost just gets tabulated up on a per band member basis. It’s a brilliant system, and the result was stunning. We went for a heavy brass section, and almost every person at our wedding complimented us on the music. That dance floor copped a fearful working over!
For the rest of the day and night (when the band wasn’t playing) we simply hooked an iPod up to the speaker system and trusted one of our friends to play DJ. It was the perfect combination of personal and free.
We wanted our wedding to have an X-factor, and both of us being big music lovers, we opted to make a statement with our band. We also wanted our guests to get dancing as early as possible, so good tunes would certainly help with that!
We hired a band that was formed out of a collective – a concept I hadn’t really heard of before. Basically, you get to build your own band. You choose however many band members you like, who play whatever instruments you like, and the cost just gets tabulated up on a per band member basis. It’s a brilliant system, and the result was stunning. We went for a heavy brass section, and almost every person at our wedding complimented us on the music. That dance floor copped a fearful working over!
For the rest of the day and night (when the band wasn’t playing) we simply hooked an iPod up to the speaker system and trusted one of our friends to play DJ. It was the perfect combination of personal and free.
Post-wedding
So our big day came and went as quickly as people had said it would, but in a brilliant way. Apart from some slight traffic troubles (photos took an hour longer than they should have because of a crash) the day went by without a hitch, and we were left to enjoy our two-week honeymoon up in the Daintree Rainforest (which, by the way, is the perfect honeymoon destination, |
as long as you work around school holidays. Luckily we were told ahead of time).
So what did we learn from our wedding?
So what did we learn from our wedding?
Some hot tips
Having had the experience of planning and executing our wedding day in style, I feel qualified enough to deliver some planning advice. So here goes:
That’s about it. It’s now up to you to plan and execute your very own perfect day. Good luck!
Having had the experience of planning and executing our wedding day in style, I feel qualified enough to deliver some planning advice. So here goes:
- Use your vendors to search out other vendors. This ensures quality, and in our case resulted in some nice discounts
- Sign up for a rewards-heavy credit card before you start paying for your wedding. You might as well get a free flight out of all this spending!
- Prepare for the worst weather. You never know what Mother Nature has in store
- When budgeting, set aside some emergency cash. It’s more than likely that you’ll end up needing it
- Invest in a wedding website to keep track of RSVPs. The centralisation makes everything far easier
That’s about it. It’s now up to you to plan and execute your very own perfect day. Good luck!