Here is how we did/are completing our wedding preparations.

First, the most important thing is to set your expectations and budget. For us, it was mostly about meeting my dream wedding at the hub’s tolerated budget. It’s not easy, we have gone for overkill for certain items such as photography, but saved on others such as the favors and cards and whats not. In particular, here was how we went about planning blindly:

Hotel: Seriously, do you even need a wedding planner for this? Save it! Do your research online, lug the hubs around, and attend as many wedding shows as you like to. It’s a time to bond and to engage in couple discussion.

Theme: If the hubs and guests are game enough, you could have a helluva fun of a wedding. My hubs is more traditional, so no real theme to play around with besides our ROM on the Little Mermaid. So you happen to have a separate ROM, and don’t want to have the hassle of planning a themed banquet with 300 over guests, have one for the ROM (with 30 guests)!

Flowers: Choose the colour combination, theme (if applicable) and the extent of the elaborated decorations which you want/had seen in the magazines. Chances are that most florists (unless you pay) would recommend the usual flowers and style, so you would have to do your due diligence. 

Wedding favors: Go to Bangkok and source cheaply. Or be like us, who will be choosing the best options that are available from the hotel, and package them differently so that they look like our personalised wedding favors.

Cake: Spend thousands on a real 5 tier cake and have the guests filled to the brim with your wedding cake? Not a good idea, unless you are only serving cake or have the money to spare. We opted for a small two tier for the ROM instead, together with the theme, and will be going ahead with the dummy cake which the hotel is going to provide. You can always play around with flowers to decorate the cake.

JieMeis and XiongDis: How many to choose? For us, we decided to have a big team of 8 each. This allows for a larger crowd to heighten the atmosphere, more hands to spare and more tasks to clear! You would also be able to include more close friends to share this once in a life experience together with you.

Emcees: Who to choose? Nope, not the JieMeis or XiongDis for us. They would already have been dead beat by the night, having had to endure the whole day with us! Instead, we found other friends to help out!

Car: Go for a dream car which you know you would never in your lifetime get!

Cards: I would have loved to have a themed invitation card together with the decorations, but from the experience at the ROM, I realise that people do not really bother about the cards! Nice they would look in the photo (if the photographer remembers to snap a shot of it), otherwise, what a waste they would be. I have friends who also tell me to save the Earth and just inform them verbally! But of course, we couldn’t resist personalising the cards a little still.

Just a little sharing from the above that it seems like most of the wedding preps can be done so simply and yet can cost you a limb or two when wedding planners enter the picture. I do wish I had the luxury of engaging one, but I have also been advised that a wedding is, after all, not a show that you put up, but rather, a celebratory dinner which the people whom you know will be happy for you, will be there to cheer for you, and not merely the decorations which you put up for them. So just for those of us who are unable to engage one, just enjoy the process of being able to plan a huge event together, and enjoy the fruits of your labour thereafter. 🙂