2015 Wedding

muffins76

lettice wrote: »

We're thinking about an early 2015 wedding too - probably in January or February.

We're not sure how much to budget. As a lot of our guests - potentially including both of our families - will be travelling to the wedding (it's 60-90 minutes to where we live), I feel it is right and proper to have a formal, sit-down wedding breakfast to thank them for their trouble.

How much would you budget for a wedding for approx. 80?

It depends on what sort of ceremony/reception you would like?

We are having a civil ceremony in one of the licensed premises in our local town, it is a beautiful historic building & has personal meaning to us. We are then having a marquee at home because my parents have old farm land which they no longer use. We are in the South West so very lucky in terms of location choices, but I know many others don't have that. My parents are contributing to the costs of the venue hire and marquee hire, but everything else we are funding ourselves. There will still be big costs for us like food etc.

Are you thinking church or civil ceremony?

Reception in the same or different venue? Some hotels & other licensed premises can do both ceremony & reception.

tatabubbly

Hey girls! How are things going? ?

I'm still not engaged yet but got €600 away towards my ring!

I'd love a church ceremony, and then onto a lovely hotel that we picked!

Peanut2013

Lettice, we're looking at 100 in day and 150 in evening for about £2.5 - £3k. Will be a sit down meal, but not your traditional 3 course meal!

It can be done

Pinzy

Lettice - they're coming for your wedding, not to be fed posh food
Depends entirely on what you're doing - one of my budgets had us all in a hired hall with an external caterer doing a hog roast, with a saving of about £1.5k (for 60 people). I looked at all the licenced venues in our area, disregarded most of them as too pricey (over £5k), then picked between the two that were left!

Regarding the OP - if you're getting a professional cake, apparently that's something to get booked up at least a year in advance.

lettice

Hi all

Thank you for your replies. We're going to have a civil ceremony, as neither of us are churchgoers.

I've spoken to a few hotels in the area and it looks like it's going to cost in the region of £7k for the reception if we go with one of those. Price includes catering (day and evening), ample alcohol, room hire for the ceremony, and entertainment (in-house DJ). I'm budgeting for 90 guests. We've got 44 family members to invite between us - and that's just our parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles plus a few partners.

If we want to spend that much, we can afford it (particularly if we set the date for early 2015) but I can't help but think that £7k is more than our car cost...

We're going to look at 3, maybe 4, venues over the next bank holiday weekend and see if we're impressed with what's on offer and whether we think it's worth it. Very excited!

We've been to three weddings now together and are starting to get an idea of what we want. The last one was a really low-key affair - lovely civil ceremony at the local registry office followed by a reception at home. It worked really well considering space was at a premium but we've got double the number of guests than they had and I'm not keen on hosting something like that at home, not least because we're still renting and it would be a bit of a squeeze. They certainly spent a fair whack too so I'm not sure it's a massively cost effective option! The other two were big church ceremonies followed by a reception in a posh hotel and barn.

The main alternative is to hire a pretty village hall - we've had one quote for £600 for 3 days, which is amazing but there's an agreement with the villagers that they'll only hold 3 weddings a year so I expect we've got to get in there quite quickly if we want to go ahead. We're going to check it out when we look at the hotel venues at the end of the month! If we book it, we'll have the service in the registry office and get outside caterers in (we're thinking a hog roast would be pretty cost effective) but we can do a booze cruise (or even go to the supermarket, considering the prices hotels charge for alcohol are extortionate) and save hundreds on the alcohol. I think that way we'll keep costs down without having to worry about roping in guests to serve food, etc.

soapaddict_2

hi
we planned our wedding in six weeks, that is booked venue for reception, booked church, honeymoon, bought dresses, 4 bridesmaids etc. Sometimes you can plan too far in advance. i think about a year is good, anymore and it can become too much. Our wedding was great, everything was perfect even the weather and the best thing thing was that none of the dresses needed altering as we bought them so close to the wedding. Good luck to all of you and just make sure you enjoy the day and the whole thing doesn't take over your life.

mazziem

I'm a 2015 bride! 22/02/2015

Might be 2015 but doing my best to do odd bits that I can now xx

purple_runner

Me too!! No date picked yet though, all we've decided on is the year! Hoping to starting thinking about what we might like over the next few months though and working out how to do it on a budget.

One problem we might have is if we stay local to us then both our families and most our friends will have to travel. But if we need to keep things small, would it be awful to invite some people just to the evening do if they have to travel ~3 hours to get there. Will they bother? We'd do our upmost to make sure everyone could come to the whole thing but if it came down to it this might have to happen.

That's the only thing I'm worried about... Can't wait to start sorting the rest!

redfragglebiker

Hai! Another 2015 bride here.

Have contacted the preferred venue to check the date is still available that we want (20th June - It will be the 7th anniversary of us getting together!) so just waiting for them to confirm that.

Other than that it's all been planned in my head but nothing formally booked yet. I know my colourscheme and approx numbers as we are getting married down South near my folks (luckily his folks live down south too) and keeping it very simple and intimate. Then it's back to Sheffield to have a mad party for all our friends with sausages on sticks and a cheesy disco!
This also means I get to wear my dress twice *squeak*

I've only been engaged for about a week and my brain is in wedding plan mode already!

Geminem

Got engaged 6 weeks ago, had engagement party last week, and we're going to look at wedding venues tomorrow :j

We're getting married 11th April 2015. I'm hoping to get at least the ceremony venue booked pretty soon, and then start looking at everything else after Christmas.

We've not got a budget as such, we just want to do it as cheap as possible! Definitely no more than 5k, ideally half that price would be nice!
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