Weddingbee Blog

Well, my friends, it is now less than a week to my wedding–I can’t believe it. I am totally calm, I kid you not. Almost everything is done. Momma Puff and Puff Daddy are coming into town tonight, and they each have a short list of projects to help me out, but all the big things are DONE!

The one thing that has been a major lifesaver for me throughout this wedding process has been my Mad Crazy Skills of Organization. I am a Virgo and find organization infinitely amazing and loads of fun (the sick thing is that I’m totally not kidding!). Organizing all the details has actually been pretty entertaining for me, but also really helpful for all of our vendors.

First, I’d like to share with you what our house looks like right now. After that, I’ll get into my planning organization. Some of you might not find organization as thrilling as I do, so I expect that there will probably be about two comments on this post. But if this helps two people get better organized, I figure it’s worth the post.

Moving right along… our house is currently full of boxes–three separate piles of boxes, to be exact. All of the boxes are color coded, using circle stickers from Paper Source.

Purple is for the reception (cat not included):

Yellow is for the ceremony:

And pink is for the hotel:

On each sticker is the destination, and the contents are written on the box:

Inside the box, everything is carefully packed. On top is either a mock-up of the table (in this case) or instructions on how to place things:

All of these boxes will be dropped off with either the caterer (along with the alcohol) or the day of coordinators. The pink pile will come to the hotel with us–it contains things like shoes, our ketubah, accessories for my dress, bridal party gifts, etc. I have already told our catering manager that I’ve done this, and she was thrilled. My theory is this: if you want your vendors to love you, be totally organized so that it’s unlikely they’ll do anything wrong, but don’t get upset if something does go wrong.

Now, onto the more boring stuff (who am I kidding, you guys probably find this entire post boring!): the planning organization.

My friend Amanda has a drawer in her dresser filled with wedding-related paraphernalia. My friend Marianne has outfitted her purple wedding book with her own stuff. My co-worker has an entire room in her house filled with wedding crap. I have a binder.

Said binder is a little bit over the top. I have literally EVERYTHING in this binder.

Inside are samples of all of our wedding paper products, just in case I need to reference them, along with tabbed dividers. I used file folders instead of regular dividers. Inside each file folder was the contact information for that vendor. Behind the divider are all the contracts and papers related to that vendor.

My dividers are: Schedules/checklists, Ceremony Stuff, Reception Stuff, DIY stuff, Caterer, Guestlist, Cake, Band, Rehearsal Dinner, Flowers, Photographer/Videographer, Hotel, Attire, Transportation, Hair/Makeup, Rings, Budget and Honeymoon. In the back, I also have a three-ring folder for keeping various things in.

I highly recommend keeping an envelope with all of your wedding-related receipts in your binder. This has saved me from having to root through the recycling to return baskets that were the wrong size or excess paper.

Randomly, I also recommend a label maker! They’re tons of fun. Anyone else got any organizational tips?