Last October I asked my then-girlfriend, Erin, to marry me. As the cliche goes, I was lucky enough, and she was crazy enough, that she said “yes”. Soon thereafter the wedding planning began, and it’s been an on-and-off process as other events in our lives ebb and flow.
We are aiming to have our wedding in fall of 2022, so we’re giving ourselves a lot of wiggle room. Even then, it was clear we needed to get organized. There are a lot of moving parts, which only increased when we decided to have the wedding at her parent’s farm. Suddenly there were no preferred vendors, and everything was on us.
This part 1 is to briefly discuss some of the ways we’ve gotten our act together. I’m sure other posts, focusing on other elements, will follow.
Erin began by going on The Knot to look up vendors and get tips. They have a whole setup through their website and app which we tried. I made sure to quickly make us a joint email account to funnel everything to, so we could both respond easily and wouldn’t have to rely on others remembering to Reply All or CC both of us.
Since I’d been using Notion as my off-site brain for work since about June, I was eager to make use of it again. All the tools provided by The Knot were a little too prescribed, and difficult to collaborate with. It wasn’t flexible. What I think sold Erin1 on the notion of Notion was when we created a guest list. We could arbitrarily add properties2 then sort or filter by those properties.
We then built out a kan-ban board to track vendors and items required to get things working at the farm. Again, the key here was flexibility. We could guess at a few properties they’d have in common (mainly cost), but could always add more, while also keeping notes in each vendor entry. Though we still relied on our emails as a repository of information and haven’t fully embraced Notion, it’s let us keep our heads wrapped around the tasks we need to get done.
Outside of technology, we realized around the new year that having some sort of coordinator would be ideal. Erin’s parents had suggested it from the start; most venues have a manager that helps coordinate the space, has typically worked with whatever caterer or DJ that gets hired, and lets everything run smoothly. At a private residence that doesn’t exist.
So, we had a short hunt for a day-of coordinator. We really lucked out and found someone within a few days who we immediately clicked with. She had a partial planning package (for a nominal increase in price), which would allow us to have an extra person outside our family to bounce ideas off. She could help take some of the weight, suggest vendors, and have a working relationship with us before the day actually occurred.
Now, my older sister got married last year and they planned it on their own (with a little boost from my younger sister). Erin and I feel confident we could do the same were we at a standard venue. But having someone to talk to for over a year leading up to it, who can just handle all the people, problems, (and personalities) that will inevitably pop up is a huge relief.
A few months in, everything is looking great. Our coordinator is impressed with how organized we’ve been, and has helped develop a timeline of tasks to keep us on pace. This was also useful as we have no idea, other than a best guess, about when to be looking for certain vendors. It’s an exciting process, one that I hope I will learn a lot from and can help create and solidify new aspects of my relationship with my future wife.
Footnotes
- What got my foot in the door was me sitting down and saying “I’ll make everything to start, you just tell me what you want.” ↩
- The key properties were how each guest was related (side of the family, or a friend); how many guests would come in an entry, as an expected number and a maximum number; and later on we could start adding things like table numbers as we explore seating charts. ↩