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We blew something like $5k on ours 5 years ago. We paid for rings, a dress, browsing food, wine, invites, a bartender/caterer, a JP, a jukebox and a floor of a museum. It turns out that you can rent anything including museums. So we rented the bottom floor of the Portland Museum of Art for the wedding and the reception - something like 5 hours. It has a pretty cool stairway leading down to the glass gallery that we could make our entrance from and a nice big open space for dancing. We invited like 60 people and everyone showed up with friends, ~80 people, maybe more. We bought like $1500 worth of healthy browsing food from the caterer and had them serve the wine too. Her mom picked up the wine from a local store that cut us a deal on 6 or 7 cases of a variety of white wines (the floors are marble and will absorb spilled red so it's not allowed). So $650 worth of wine. Table rental from the museum was pretty cheap, call it $600 for setup and take down. Clear plastic disposable plates and wear all around - $30 at Target. Werlitzer delivery and pickup for one 24 hour period (with the box loaded with our CDs) was like $350 or something. So the plan was to have everyone show up 45 minutes before the wedding, get loaded on readily available white wine and a very small amount of walking around food - wine + not much food + music = happy dancing people. Then the JP called the meeting to order ($150 I think), played the wedding march on the jukebox and we walked down the stairs to many oos and aaaahs because my soon to be wife is amazingly beautiful and I'm pretty scary looking and old. So we were cute apparently. Or people were scared for her. Whatever. Everyone clustered at the bottom of the stairs and we did the vows while the caterer placed the food behind all the people. Then we kicked the JP out and had a party. Total for the wedding ceremony and reception then was just in excess of $3200. Dress was a few hundred for last years model, hair and all that was donated. Pictures were primarily cameras left on the tables and a couple relatives with nice cameras donating their pics. All you need is a couple of nice pictures to send to relatives and a couple to hang on your wall. The rest are just friggin fine being taken by your friends and relatives. They see stuff that a photographer misses anyway! The wedding cake was donated by a relative so that's another expense we avoided that many people can't. It would have run several hundred though. Invitations are something that friends and relatives keep so we did them all by hand. We paid a couple hundred for unfinished paper, envelopes that matched and tissue paper inserts and poo poo. Very girlie. We bought cool ink stamps and sealing wax with different wax stamps. Printed the tissue paper things and envelopes at work, signed everything by hand and wrote the salutations by hand and then stamped flowers and bugs on everything and sealed the inner invitation with real wax. People commented on the invitations ALL night so they were a success. Total cost was maybe $400 and hours of work. Rings were a couple hundred and plain. The engagement ring was an emerald I found at a gem and mineral show months earlier and had custom mounted. The rock was like a grand(not a part of the wedding expense) and the mounting was ~400 in white gold. What else.... oh yeah - we planned and executed this whole thing from Denver. The wedding was in Maine. We had relatives pick stuff up for us but 90% happened online and on the phone and came together perfectly. People flew in on their dime All in all, we made the family happy with a service, great memories, enough pics and all that for more than we wanted to spend but less than we could have by letting someone else do the planning. My suggestion is to do as much as humanly possible yourself and don't try to look like Cinderella - you should be happy during your marriage, not only at the service. The service is the easy part.
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Apr 24, 2008 17:44
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:37 |
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