If you’re wondering which four tasks you should tackle BEFORE you begin planning your wedding, then today’s wedding blog will be perfect for you!
If you’re recently engaged and are about to begin planning your wedding – congratulations! Not only is this an incredibly exciting time, but you’ll have lots of big decisions to make too! From finding your dream wedding venue and assembling a crack team of wedding suppliers, through to finding the ‘one’, (yes, we’re talking about your wedding dress), the initial stages of planning a wedding can become overwhelming.
At One Curious Dream, our team of wedding planners like to keep things simple! Before we host a wedding consultation with new clients, there are three key wedding planning tasks that we ask them to tackle.
Create a wedding guest list
Some of our wedding planning clients already have an idea about the type of wedding venue they’d choose – from beautiful rustic barns, private country houses through to spaces where a tipi wedding or marquee wedding can be hosted, our team love the variety! However, before you arrange a ton of wedding venue viewings, it’s essential to create a rough guest list to determine how many guests you will be inviting to your wedding.
This list will help you decide on the right kind of wedding venues to view – if you are keeping things small and intimate, there’s absolutely no point in considering the ballroom in the local castle, your wedding guests will look lost in all the space! Similarly, if you are aiming to create a gigantic celebration, a bespoke wedding venue that caters for 50 isn’t going to work. Of course, if you’re hiring an expert wedding planner, they’ll have a stunning portfolio of wedding venues that will tick the boxes for you.
Draft a wedding budget
Probably self-explanatory this one, but you wouldn’t believe the number of couples that start to consider their wedding budget at a much later stage than they should! We would always suggest you tie in your wedding budget discussions with pulling your wedding guest list together as the two go hand in hand.
It’s also essential that you have an open and honest discussion with your fiancé early on about wedding finances. After all, it’s hard to find the joy in wedding planning when you both have different expectations about how much cash there is to spend on the wedding.
Choose your wedding priorities!
Once you have a rough idea of your wedding budget, make a list of what is most important to you and what your priorities are for the wedding. For example, if your perfect vision is to have everybody dancing the night away, having an incredible live band or DJ needs to be apportioned appropriately in the wedding budget. Similarly, if you are both foodies, more budget will need to be allocated to the wedding breakfast and choosing an amazing wedding caterer.
Discuss options with a wedding planner
At your first wedding consultation with us, we’ll discuss the above in detail, so it’s worth doing the homework in advance! Our job as your wedding planner is to find ways to ensure your wedding budget stretches as far as possible and negotiate the very best deals for you. In fact, did you know that we often save our fees through the discounts and extras our regular wedding venues and suppliers offer to our clients?
If you’re hoping to get married across London or the East of England (Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge or Essex) and would like to chat through the plans for your wedding, we’d love to hear from you! One Curious Dream is a multi-award-winning wedding planning company, so you can be sure your wedding will be in the safest of hands!
You can reach us on 0800 772 0765 or [email protected] or book a wedding consultation.