A great find!

In the spirit of trying to pay for things now so it is not such a huge cost later, I have been on the hunt for my invitations. There are two ways you can do invitations:

1. You can order them from a place like David's Bridal or Michael's and pay for them to print them for you (I haven't found this option for cheaper than $350.00 for the 150 invitations I need) or...

2. You can buy a DIY kit and print them at home or somewhere else. Obviously since DIY is my middle name I decided to choose this more cost effective method.

I searched at David's Bridal, Michael's and other places and the general consensus was that a DIY pack of 40 invitations would cost around 40 bucks and I would need at least three of them so that would be around $150 with taxes in. I decided to hold off and keep looking. A friend of mine told me she saw invitations at home sense so I decided to go and check it out. I found three packages of 50 invitations, envelopes, response cards, and thank you cards for 9.99 each and they were in my colors. So for $34 I bought all of the stationary and envelopes for my wedding other than programs and I am delighted by this!

So brides go to home sense if you are looking to save some money on something that most people are just gonna throw out anyways!

The Initial Costs You May Not Think About

One part of this wedding planning process that I was not prepared for were the initial costs to get started. Initially this wasn't a concern of mine because we were planning on taking two years to get married and if you are not in a stable financial situation taking more than a year and a half to plan would be very smart. When we switch out date to be in a year and a few months, we immediately needed to start booking stuff. Depending on where you plan to get married you may have a little more leniency in when you start booking depending on if it is a tourist destination, the time of year, the amount of wedding venues etc. But, if you have a specific idea of where you want your wedding to be and which photographer, videographer etc you want, you should plan to book AT LEAST a year in advance. All of these services require deposits, unless you get seriously lucky. Here is the breakdown of what we have had to pay this month to get everything booked:

Hall Rental- $500.00 deposit
Photography- $200.00 deposit
Jack and Jill- $150.00 deposit.

Keep in mind that I am doing most of my wedding myself. Decorators, Videographers, DJs, Florists, Wedding Planners, Bakeries etc all typically require a deposit. We are getting married in a church so it isn't costing us money but if you were getting married at a private venue that would probably be another couple hundred dollars. The amount of money we would have to spend this early on had never even crossed my mind, so hopefully this will help you be a little more prepared than we were.

Rolling With The Punches

The last week has been crazy. As crazy as it was, it made me realize how flexible you have to be when planning a wedding. We thought we had our date set in stone, however, unfortunately when booking our hall we found out it was already booked. This sent up red flags for Josh and I because its a pretty small community and chances are we would know who booked it. So we put the question out there and found out that one of Josh's good friends had booked his wedding that weekend.

So started the scramble. We had to look for another weekend, we had to call everyone back and rebook everything. I seriously considered eloping at this point, it still goes through my mind every once in awhile, but it will all be worth it once it is the big day.

We rescheduled everything for October 26th, 2013. Ceremony at St. Joseph's in North Sydney, Reception at Sydney Mines Fireman's Centre.

Hoorayyy!