Wedding Planning – Getting Started

The last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind for me. So many changes in such a short amount of time. My favorite change of them all? An engagement (beach, stars, very romantic) to my best friend and partner in life (soon to be for the rest of my life!). With an engagement comes the planning of a wedding, and since I’m all about planning, I didn’t waste my time diving in. But since I’ve never planned a wedding before, I needed to figure out where to start.

There are so many free resources online, but they all have different bias and suggest slightly different things. I decided some sort of book, a physical one that would give me a chance to do this off the computer and a chance to think for myself, would be a good idea. Scouring Amazon online isn’t the same as holding books in your hands. I hit the brick-and-mortar Amazon Bookstore, and flipped through a few of the wedding guides they had. Most of them were too “these are the things you must do” for me, but one really stood out from the rest.

A Practical Wedding Planner by Meg Keene caught my eye almost right away. Right on the front it tells you it’s “a step-by-step guide to creating the wedding you want with the budget you’ve got (without losing your mind in the process)”. Exactly what I’m looking to do! But in all seriousness, this book has so much info packed into it. Not just to create one version of what a wedding should be, but anything you want a wedding to be. From small and informal to huge and super traditional, this book sends you in the right direction.

Something I liked right from the start was the emphasis this guide puts on communication. The first thing it suggests you do is have a conversation as partners on what the individual and combined goals and priorities are. Certainly, ending up married is goal #1, but everyone envisions something slightly different. We were able to separately go through the suggested items, and pick out our must haves and don’t wants. We were pretty much on the same page from the start. The top three must haves we came up with after combining our lists are our focus going into this planning process. We get to use them as a reminder not to get lost in the details.

I’m excited to share some more of our planning process, but I think a really important part of any planning process is getting started, which is often the most difficult part. Starting with a focus on the big picture and not on the specifics on that pinterest board we all have, has been a great guide for us through this process.

Have you planned your own wedding? How did you get started with the process? Was there a particular resource that helped you get through it?