The Bad & The Ugly: Leading Up To The Wedding Part 1

It's been awhile since I last made an appearance. To tell the truth, I've dreaded writing these posts about the things that made my wedding leave a sour taste in my mouth. It can be hard to find the right words to explain all my feelings. Not to mention that writing about my experience online could cause some...er...complications...with relatives/friends who disappointed me and a few vendors with outstanding contractual duties.

But I'm going to take a shot at it anyways. This isn't about them and I deserve to vent about my wedding so I can finally move on.

*Deep breath* Okay, here goes. Gosh, where do I start? Well, for what it's worth, everything seemed fine until about a week out from the wedding. In fact, it wasn't until I was in Savannah that things began to unravel. Most of the things that went wrong before the wedding were a direct result from my poor planning.

The mess we made at my SIL's house with all my wedding stuff.

Listen up ladies that are not yet wed! If you are a DIY bride, give yourself a deadline of at least a week before the wedding for your projects. If it's not done a week out, it's probably NOT going to get done. I was incredibly naive to think that I could get all my last-minute projects squared away in time to truly enjoy myself during the wedding. For the record, these are all the things I had left to do 3 days out:

• Provide a shot list to photographer/pick up groom's gift
  
• Give signed contract to cinematographer
• Book vendor hotels
• Sign and pay for the ghost tour after rehearsal dinner
  
• Make ceremony drinks and tags
• Finish bouquets
  
• Write out love letter for love letter box and wrap with ribbon for Jr. BM to carry
• Send wedding party song & ceremony song list & reception song suggestions to D.J.
• Make candy apple escort cards (purposely left for when we arrived in Savannah)
  
• Make table numbers
• Create guides for coordinator (including centerpiece, ceremony, & reception set ups)
• Final walk-through of reception site
• Organize all wedding items to make sure they got to proper locations
  
• Search for cake stand
• Find new mother of the bride dress because the one I got didn't fit her
• Wrap bridesmaids' gifts
  
• Put photos in bouquet locket
• Fix a scheduling problem at our ceremony site (mentioned here)
  
• Put together fauxtobooth
• Finish and drop off OOT bags (same as escort cards, purposely put off)
  
• Confirm vendors that other people were responsible for booking
  
• Confirm times/head counts and make final vendor payments

It seemed like my to-do list kept growing the closer we got to the wedding. With every item we checked off, two were added! I really did think that I could knock some of these items off fairly easy, but it just wasn't the case. Near the end, I really wondered if the wedding would come together at all. I stayed up late EVERY NIGHT before the wedding. I probably totaled only about 20 hours of sleep from the Wednesday we arrived in Savannah until the wedding day on Saturday.

Source

What makes me really upset with myself is knowing that I could have easily gotten some of these things done well before the wedding. Yes, I was busy working and attending classes all while planning this wedding. But there were days where I would flat out go home and take a nap instead of getting simple tasks done that could have alleviated a lot of pre-wedding stress.

For the most part, I ended up just letting the things that weren't going to get done go. I decided to cut them off the list and focus on the things that had a real chance of survival. And that's how the ceremony drinks, candy apple escort cards and fauxtobooth died. And these things were generally no biggies, except that I accidentally pointed out to our guests that they were missing. Like having table numbers with no escort cards (and spending weeks planning out the table arrangements). Or cups at the ceremony site and a note on the back of the invitation about refreshments with no drinks actually present (and spending money on useless infusion jars, a table, and linens for that matter). And referring to the fauxtobooth in our OOT bag and guestbook (which was to be photos from the fauxtobooth accompanied by messages from our guests, thus making our guestbook non-existent as well-not to mention money wasted here, too).

The candy apple escort card project that my "moms" worked on for nothing. We just didn't have time to do all 60+ 2 days before the wedding.

Another alert for brides-to-be: Killing ideas last minute didn't bother me as much as the tell-tale signs that they were missing. Remember that fave line people use to comfort an upset bride? "It's okay, the guests won't even notice it's missing!" Yeah, that one. They just might if you paint a picture for them that something's missing.

But these are just a few of the things that went wrong before the wedding. The things that I chose to cut. But what about the things that fell to the wayside because of someone else? Stayed tuned.

Married gals, did you choose to cut things last minute to focus on getting other tasks done? Brides-to-be, have you designated which items you could live without if you had to cut some?