Keene - A practical wedding planner : a step-by-step guide to creating the wedding you want with the budget youve got (without losing your mind in the process)

ALSO BY MEG KEENE

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

Copyright 2015 by Meg Keene

Illustrations by Eunice Moyle

Invitation design on

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210

Book Design by Linda Mark

Set in 11.5-point Goudy Oldstyle Std by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keene, Meg.

A practical wedding planner: a step-by-step guide to creating the wedding you want with the budget youve got (without losing your mind in the process) / Meg Keene.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7382-1843-4 (e-book) 1. WeddingsPlanning. 2. WeddingsEconomic aspects. I. Title.

HQ745.K444 2015

392.5dc23

2015024338

First Da Capo Press edition 2015

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For J., who taught me a new kind of love.

And for L., who was with me every step of the way.

Table of Contents

Contents

Y OU JUST GOT ENGAGED! OR YOUVE been engaged for a while but are finally sitting down to plan this party. Or, hell, maybe you havent made anything exactly official yet, but you know you want to spend your lives together.

Whichever! Ice the bubbly!

If you havent taken some time to bliss out and enjoy this massive and wonderful decision, shut this book and go do that already. When youre ready to take a deep breath and start planning, meet me back here.

Going from the joy of a new engagement to the nitty-gritty of putting the actual celebration together can be a little like switching from drinking champagne to dumping the bucket of ice you were cooling it in over your head. Not much of the huge wedding industry is actually set up to help couples plan weddings in the real world. The myth is that everyone (except maybe you) is employing a full-service caterer, choosing the fanciest chairs, and hiring a floral designer, a DJ, and a highend planner to do most of the work.

The reality is that most of us have some limitations on what kind of wedding we can, or even want to, afford. Were aiming for weddings that more or less fit our values, without driving us into financial and emotional ruin. The wedding industry, for its part, is mostly trying to sell us more things.

In between the hard sales of pretty things and the assumption that most of us have wedding planners and unlimited funds, it turns out that there is not a ton of helpful information out there about how to actually put your wedding together. Not the etiquette of addressing wedding invitations (though well get to that), but how to figure out what you should actually do first, how to decide if you should hire a traditional caterer or rent a taco truck (or if you even want to serve a meal), and how to put together an accurate timeline of the day of the wedding.

When I was getting married, my now husband and I couldnt find much logistical advice that we trusted, so we muddled through our wedding planning, making it up as we went. Although wed both done some work on events before, we still did not have a fantastically clear idea of what we were doing. We refrigerated our DIY flowers in a normal food fridge (dont do that; they will wilt), and I bought a last-minute vintage wedding dress because I was too overwhelmed and confused by the policies of wedding salons to bring myself to shop for a traditional dress.

In the years since then, as founder and editor in chief of APracticalWedding.com, Ive tried to help countless couples plan the weddings that will leave them feeling joyful, not emotionally exhausted and broke. But as the years have gone on, Ive realized that I was far from alone in planning a wedding without understanding how to get from point A to point B. And though, in my opinion, your wedding matters because of how it makes you feel, its hard to have a blissful experience if you cant figure out how to find a venue you can afford, avoid body shaming while wedding dress shopping, or get your wedding venue set up before your guests arrive.

In short, there is more to having a joyful wedding than the emotional guidance I offered in my book A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration. There is also the need to understand rentals without tearing your hair out. So, over many months, I set about interviewing many wedding planners and other professionals (the saner the better) to distill the information you need most when planning a real-life wedding. This book is based on my eight years of editing APracticalWedding.com, but its also based on the no-nonsense secrets of the trade that many awesome wedding professionals were willing to share.

At some point in writing this book, I stopped counting the number of things I wished wed known while planning our own wedding. Because our wedding was emotional and beautiful and transcendent, even if our planning wasnt. But I hope this book serves as a tool to help you plan with fewer mistakes and less fumbling desperately in the dark than I, and most of my friends, experienced. There is no way to make wedding planning a totally painless process, but my goal is to make it far less confusing. That way you can make smarter and more informed decisions and get back to what really mattersyour relationship and the people you love.

This book is not designed to be read cover to cover, detail by detail. If you have a wedding with every single element included in this book, youre not having a wedding; youre having some sort of three-ring circus. This book is meant to serve as a planning guide, and a wedding encyclopedia of sorts. If you realize you need to know how to plan for a food truck wedding, flip to those pages. If you decide you need to rent a wedding tent, dog-ear that section. And if the time has come to write your vows, peruse the tips and tricks on making them meaningful, and steal from other peoples work. Plus, when youre in the real trenches of planning, you can flip through the Appendix to look at spreadsheets you might want to copy or to review checklists of (actually kind of important) stuff you might be forgetting.