Great 'What I wish I’d known before my wedding' Hunt

JJ's House is an amazing website that makes wedding dresses and wedding party dresses to order. Low prices and high quality, my sister is getting married in the summer and ordered all our dresses from them. Quality is excellent and dresses are stunning. You send them the measurements and they make to order.

We got married in 2006 and thinking back, there are a lot of things we did successfully to minimise the cost and other things where I reckon we wasted money.

The successes first. We made all of invitations ourselves, it was great fun and a good distraction from other stresses in an evening. We had my wife's sister and her boyfriend do the photography (they were art students) and they came out really well - don't listen to other people on here worrying about "what if the camera breaks?", do professional photographers somehow have indestructible cameras? We had lottery tickets for favours that went down brilliantly. We asked for cash instead of wedding presents and paid for the honeymoon with this - no one batted an eyelid at the request and some even said it was much easier than buying presents. On a previous trip back from France, I filled up the car with red, White and Rose wine and had a bottle of each on each table with the same again in the back - I can't remember the exact cost but it was much cheaper than the venue's prices and there was even plenty left over for the evening do, in fact at work my wedding is still talked about by some as "the one with the free wine".

The biggest wasted expense about the day would have to be the food - we had about 50 for the day and another 50 for the evening but catered for 100 in the evening. Big mistake, the people who had been there in the day had eaten the big main meal and so didn't want much, so only about half of the evening buffet got eaten. When you're paying per head, it makes a huge difference and we wasted hundreds of pounds. I had a big fear of running out and looking like a cheapskate but we didn't even get close to that. Secondly, I didn't haggle for much at all, reading on here makes me wish I'd done more!

Best bargain I have seen was a wedding bouquet from Morrisons supermarket, if you have a superstore near you take a look. Cost £30 (last year's price) was absolutely beautiful and looked as good as bouquets I have seen for £100-£150.

My son got married last year, he had not long joined the navy and his ship was going away so they wanted to get married before he left. It was all organised in a few weeks and friends and family made the cake, the invitations, provided the car (a rolls belonging to a friend of a friend), took the photos and made a video and wedding album, (they were very lucky as that friend is a professional photographer) and decorated the tables. It was a lovely day and the whole wedding only cost a couple of thousand including buffet, music etc. As they have been together for about 13 years it was a lovely way for everyone to share their day without buying them presents they didn't need.

SuperSaver123 wrote: »

Hi All,

I am wondering if somebody could point me in the right direction: I need to get a wedding dress: in ivory colour and short (to be more specific ) and not sure where to find one that is on budget.

I also wanted to do get some friends involved into making invitations but the stationery seems expensive as it is. Any ideas for cheap but nice stationery?

My big day is end of August this year!

I bought my short wedding dress from ilovebridal.co.uk which ships from China (mine took 3 weeks to deliver), but are so cheap compared to other dresses! Going to try and sell my wedding dress on ebay this week, if I make half the money back, it will help go towards the honeymoon!