Intro: Planning My Dream Budget Wedding

As you may or may not know, I got engaged this past April in Hawaii. You can read about my Hawaii engagement post here and also see some of my engagement photos here.

It actually took me close to 5 months after my engagement to actually begin planning my wedding. Now that I’ve finally got the ball rolling, I’ll start doing posts on my wedding plans right here on my blog. I’m even gonna make it easier for you to follow by adding a wedding category that you can easily find on my blog’s side bar.

But to begin this first wedding post off properly, I want to give you a little background on myself.

I never once dreamed about my wedding. Not when I was little, and surely not when I was older. The only thing I ever thought of was walking down the aisle to either Pachelbel’s Canon or a Star Wars song. Don’t get me wrong, I am in love with the idea of love and being able to spend the rest of my life with that special someone… but who really gives a hoot about wedding planning? Apparently, almost everyone and their mothers.

Recently, I joined in on the mass pinning of wedding related photos on Pinterest. Yes, I’ve created a Wedding Pinterest Board, in case you are interested in following or simply having a look at it. This is when I realized that almost a perfect 100% of my Pinterest friends had already created their own Wedding boards. I thought this was ridiculous because half of them don’t even have boyfriends! That’s when it hit me… A woman’s wedding day may very well be one of the most important days in her life!

This (surprisingly) came to me as a huge shock. Maybe there are some girls out there who can relate to me? Or am I just weird? I used to watch chick flicks back when I was in high school, but only because my girlfriends used to get me into them. Instead, I’ve always seemed to gravitate towards Sci-Fi and Action/Adventure type movies. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that I watched the movie Bridesmaids and I cried my eyes out. Now that I think of it, I really know nothing about weddings or what I’m getting myself into. I haven’t even heard of the term “bridal shower” until my coworkers mentioned it to me after I got engaged. Horrible! But thank God for Google and good friends who can help hold my hand along the way and lead me down the right path.

With that said, now you know where I am coming from. I am starting off my wedding planning with no knowledge of wedding traditions, no wedding experience, and no prior wedding dreams. What it all boils down to for my wedding is that I want everyone to have a good time and for things to run smoothly, so here are my 3 wedding must haves.

My 3 Wedding Must Haves:

1. Unlimited Alcohol
2. Good Food
3. Photo Booth

I believe that these 3 elements are all you need for a perfect wedding. No one is going to remember your centerpieces, color arrangements, or song choices. What people will remember is whether or not they had fun and if the food was good or not!

HA! But I can’t make good wedding blog posts if I don’t write about all wedding planning details. Therefore, you can expect to read about wedding themes, wedding color schemes, wedding venue locations, how to plan for a budget wedding, and so much more! I’ll make sure to post all my DIYs and ideas onto my blog for you to follow.

Let me now share with you what I’m working with and my wedding goals.

My 5 Wedding Goals:

1. Wedding Budget $10,000 – This is tough because the average wedding cost in the United States is about ~$35,000.
2. Los Angeles Venue – I want to have my wedding in the city that I grew up, but having it in LA really goes against my wedding budget goal since venues are much more pricey in this area.
3. Less Than 4 Months To Plan – I want to hurry up and sort of “get the wedding over with.” That sounds kinda bad but the fast I get this out of the way, the faster I can focus on other things in my life. Currently, my wedding date is set for March 22, 2014! Problems with this time frame is that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all falls within the four months that I have to plan, but I believe we can do it.
4. No Bridezilla – My wedding needs to go as smoothly as possible, and I refuse to become a bridezilla. Please slap me if I begin to show teeth.
5. Have Fun – Probably the most important goal, but also easiest to forget, everyone needs to have fun. I consider myself the first in my group of friends to get married, so this will definitely be an experience to remember for all of us. Let’s make it count!

If you made it all the way through to the end of my first wedding blog post, kudos to you, because this is a lot of reading with no photos at all! Thanks for reading~ I hope you keep coming back and give me some moral support and wedding feedback!

Thanks for reading!
xoxo Sarah