Weddingbee Blog

In the initial days—OK, hours…fine, minutes—after getting engaged, I did a lot of freaking out. As in, financial freaking out. This was mostly a result of my trying to decide everything within a week with no information whatsoever. I judged the price of things by the first few places we stumbled upon, and had a meltdown thinking there was no way we could save a reasonable amount of money in the time between our engagement and our wedding.

Soon, though things began to look up. We knocked some things off the list right away—limo, f’rinstance—and relegated other items, like bridal-party gifts and pre-wedding beauty treatments, to our own personal budgets. We have some very connected friends with very talented buddies, and managed to book our photographer and DJ based on personal references. We found our hitherto uncovered venue from a bridesmaid, and our sweet graphic-artist friend designed and printed our invitations as a wedding gift to us.

Plus, I planned to DIY a lot. But I love crafts. And I love buying craft supplies. So it was a win-win-win: I get to shop, I get to make pretty things, and guests get to ooh and ahh.

I was particularly adamant about the floral aspect.

Image via Real Simple / Photo by Debra McClinton

Fifty to one my wildflower bouquet would not look nearly as nice as this.

“Flowers are WAAAAY too expensive!” I would screech. “You put ‘wedding’ on it and all of a sudden it’s stupid costly. I am picking wildflowers.”

Sanity surfaced a bit: “Haha…wildflowers. Nah, I’ll just go to the farmers’ market the morning of the wedding.”

Um, that insane plan lasted about five minutes.

“Fine, I’ll order in bulk and make my own bouquets and centerpieces, and it will be awesome and cheap.”

I would tell people this, though, knowing in my heart this wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted people to say I was nuts. That I should hire a florist. That I could find somebody reasonable. I wanted a bouquet and centerpieces designed like I could have never done on my own. I wanted a professional to worry about it, rather than me. And really, I didn’t want to order flowers online and stress they wouldn’t get here on time/be the right color/work well together/be of good quality, even though I obsessively researched review after review. I also really didn’t want to transport these suckers from home to wherever to the venue, and then basically beg a friend to arrange them for me.

OK, so…maybe a florist *wouldn’t* be such a bad idea. But with so much of our budget being delicately trimmed away, would there be room for another vendor, especially for such a potentially pricey detail? And, more importantly, would I be able to squelch my love of pretty in favor of staying on target with our budget and staying true to my “I like it simple” credo?

Did you have any DIYs that morphed from crazy to slightly less crazy to “can I really do this myself”?