Single Pink Rose

When my mum and dad got married in 1984 they were young and in love... but limited on cash.

Their wedding was for 50 close friends and family at our local Abbey.  My dad wore his soldiers uniform, Mum and my Nan (her mum) made the wedding dress, which was very on trend at the time and she carried a single pink porcelain rose!

After the wedding my nan kept the rose on a shelf at the top of her stairs... it was only recently several years after my nan passed away and I am thinking about my future wedding that I remembered the rose.  All those years as a child climbing the stairs, seeing the rose but not realising what it stood for!

Even now 12 years after my parents split up that rose has meaning, and I really wanted to use it on my big day.  Sadly 30 years after their big day the rose is no longer :-(

Planning the Wedding Budget

The next step for me was the decided on a budget, I do not want to spend my life savings on the wedding (because if I am honest I'd prefer to run away and get married rather than have a big party for everyone else)!  So I set an amount after a bit of research, and settled on £12k, plus any extra provided by our parents.  The average wedding budget in the UK is £11-12k, and in the US $19.5k (but most spend between 14-25).

I feel it is very important to keep track of the costs because once you start going deeper into the wedding details there is so much you want to include or add and soon you'll be a few thousand over budget, at one point our budget was edging toward £16k!! :O  Because of this though I found lots of way to save on cost which I will share with you all as I take this process!

I used a simple excel spread sheet to keep track of costs, budgeted, deposits, and total spend - I also used this as a list of what needs to be done, and where I had found ideas, plus contact names etc.

If you do a Google search you'll find plenty of wedding planner checklist free to download.  http://www.savvysugar.com/Wedding-Planning-Checklist-3039079