All the fun things that come along with planning/prepping for our wedding.

After making our invitations and handling a lot of the prep for the engagement party, we knew that we wanted to have a lot of DIY to our wedding.

As anyone that has planned a wedding know…. you need to figure out a date asap! Of course, that takes coordination from your family, friends, church, reception location, etc, etc, etc.

After a few attempts, we finally were able to settle on August 20, 2011.

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church – Long Beach, CA

With that finalized we could then focus on the other eleventy billion things that come with it. We won’t go into all of the details here, but will provide some highlights.

-Weddings are expensive. Weddings in southern California are very expensive. 🙂
-Finding a location that could hold our event(size, wants, etc) isn’t as easy as you’d think, living in a metropolis of 400K.
-Cake tasting is fun. Especially when Rossmoor Pastries is involved.
-Being limited in who you can invite isn’t fun… We definitely would have liked to have more invitations sent, but unfortunately our banking account had a more modest number in mind.
-Checklists make the world go around. Make big lists, make smaller more defined ones… just have one/some.
-The Knot is what we used for tips, ideas, and the aforementioned checklists.

Some of our DIY-ness:

Invitations

Wedding Ceremony Programs

(pencils were attached to the wooden handles… gave our guests something to do prior to the ceremony)

Ceremony Programs

Hotel Gift Bags

Planning and prep are different for many couples. We decided to be more hands on, although hiring a coordinator did cross our minds a few different times.

Overall, it went pretty smoothly and didn’t cause any major fights! 🙂