How to Enjoy the Wedding Planning Process

This post is sponsored by Basic Invite but all content and opinions are my own.

Our 7th wedding anniversary is right around the corner, which had me thinking about all of the wedding planning fun we had…and some of the things I’d rather not revisit from the wedding planning process 🙂 We started our wedding planning not too long after Pinterest starting taking off, so it was so easy to pull together concepts and ideas. I also had a huge wedding binder (yes, really) that I kept ideas, paperwork, checklists, etc. in to stay on track. With that said, I still had moments of frustration and I let some aspects of the planning process stress me out, but I’m here to tell you that even if something doesn’t work out as planned, your big day will be FINE. Focus on what matters and control the things you can control, but just know that it will all work out in the end regardless. Here are a few of my favorite pieces of wedding planning advice, in hindsight.

Include your fiance in the process.

I know some guys may not be super into wedding planning, but it’s their wedding too, so give them a chance to voice their opinion and invite them to come to all of your vendor meetings (like flowers, catering, cake, etc.). My husband was very invested in the process and wanted to work together to do the planning (which we did ourselves without a wedding planner!). We created a Pinterest board for all of our ideas and we spent time each weekend browsing and discussing different aspects of our wedding. It actually became a fun date to grab a cup of coffee and do a little wedding planning together!

Control the controllable.

This is extremely all-encompassing, but there are certain details of the wedding you CAN control, like colors, attire, decor, invitations, etc. and there are some you simply cannot. For us, it was the inability to control the actions of other people. And that’s most likely the case for anyone planning a wedding 😉 From opinions and complaints from the wedding party/family to ensuring our vendors took our ideas and properly executed them, we just had to go with the flow in certain areas. We actually had two things happen at our wedding that pre-wedding Brittany would have had a meltdown over: our table centerpiece flowers ended up looking nothing like what we requested from the florist and our limo ride never showed up at the end of our reception. But, all of this happened after our actual wedding took place and truly all that mattered was the fact we were finally MARRIED, so these things ended up not bothering me all that much in the end. Though the flowers were never fixed, one of our guests actually had a limo waiting to take them to their hotel and graciously offered it to us so we could have our official sendoff at the end of the reception – so that aspect ended up working out after all!

Plan as far ahead of time as possible.

After we got engaged, we knew we wanted a fall wedding, which meant we had 10 months to plan the entire event. It ended up being just enough time, but I can’t stress enough the importance of giving yourself ample time to plan – especially if you are planning to get married during the busiest wedding season! The closer it gets to your event, the harder it is to ensure all of your vendors have that specific date available. We ended up having to be flexible on our wedding date in order to make the reception venue work, and then I had to call several rental vendors in order to find one that had the number of chairs and tables available that we needed for our reception. In general, the earlier you can coordinate all of this, the less stressful the process will be – which means more time to enjoy the wedding planning process.

Have fun choosing invitations.

One of my favorite aspects of wedding planning was choosing our invitations for our engagement party, bridal showers and the actual wedding. This is a great way to pull together the overall theme for your wedding and give your guests a sneak peek of your colors and style! Basic Invite has some of the prettiest designs, like these gold foil bridal shower invitations. I love the fact that Basic Invite offers wedding websites that match your invitation suite – such a great idea! One of my favorite things (that we absolutely took advantage of!) is the ability to order samples of invitations before you make a decision on which invitation you’ll be sending to your guests. If you’re looking for ideas for bridal shower invitations and more, be sure to check out Basic Invite for all of your needs!