Wedding Planning: Where to Start

If you’re here because you just got engaged, Congratulations! We’re so excited for you! We know you and your partner want to bask in the warm glow of forever love, but soon you’ll be ready to get to work creating your dream wedding. If you’ve never planned a wedding before, you’ll quickly find there’s a lot of details to tend to, and not necessarily in any particular order. Here, the professionals at Griffin’s Weddings hope to guide you through where to start, what to prioritize and what to save until closer to the wedding date itself. Take a deep breath, pull out that cute wedding organizer, and let’s get started!

Start Here

Once you’ve created a wedding budget and a basic timeline, you’ll want to choose your date and your venue. While being flexible is great for plenty of other wedding aspects, these two items will be your answer to all other vendors. Everyone- and we mean EVERYONE- will be asking which date and where to deliver or show up. Until you can answer those questions, you’ll have a difficult time booking a photographer, caterer, florist, DJ, and anyone else that needs to bring their services to you. So, think about the when and where first, then go from there.

Some Things to Prioritize

Once you have the framework of your wedding day in place, you’ll want to start thinking about a theme, colors, and the overall vibe of your wedding and reception. This is a good time to start booking all vendors as early as possible. Call photographers, videographers, caterers, DJs, and decorators to secure your time slot early. Many will require a deposit to lock in the date, but often it is part of the overall price. Once these specific items are in place, you can start booking appointments for you, your partner, and your wedding party during the week leading up to the wedding. This includes dress and tuxedo fittings, hair and manicure appointments, massages, and anything else that you’ll be doing together as a group. If you and your partner have a specialty item you hope to include in the wedding (for example, appetizers specifically from the restaurant where he proposed), be sure to put this near the top of your list to ensure its inclusion in your big day.

Things that Can Wait

Since you can’t do everything first, there will be some aspects of your wedding that can wait until later in the planning stages before being addressed. Clothing accessories, decorations, specific menu items, and the cake can all be chosen a few months before the wedding. The type of music you’d like, the flowers you’ll need, and the specific photos you’ll need taken can all be discussed with the vendors at a later date as long as you’ve already secured their services. Usually, they’ll let you know when their deadlines are, making some of the latter planning more straightforward. Save your plans for decorating and styling your wedding for later, as well. Truly these things won’t actually happen until the day before or the day of, so you have plenty of time to gather your decorations and enlist some help making your beautiful day a reality. 

Designing the day of your dreams is exciting and should not be taken lightly. However, being flexible and open-minded makes for a much happier engagement overall. Work together with your fiance, ask for help from friends and family when needed, and make time to just enjoy one another throughout the process. Soon enough, you’ll be saying “I Do” and embarking on Happily Ever After. Let the wedding experts at Griffin’s Weddings know about your plans, or call us when you get stuck! We’re happy to help you with your wedding To-Do list so you can truly experience the wedding of your dreams.