DIY - Wedding on a budget

When my husband and I got married back in June 2016 we had a budget that we wanted to stick to and we didn't want to go mad and spend loads of money on one day. Below i'm going to share with you my tips for how you can save a little money.

Guest list

you don't have to invite your entire family if you don't want to. Not all family's are close. We only had our close family and friends at the day and then invited cousins and other friends to the evening. If you don't see or speak to them often then you're probably not that close so don't feel like you HAVE to invite them.

Book in advance

By booking in advance you will have time to budget and save and you will also usually be guaranteed the current pricing should there be any future rises. This happened with our venue and because we were on the old pricing structure it ended up a lot cheaper.

Wedding stationary

Save the dates, invites, table plans and menus. These are so easy to do yourselves and you can save so much money. I think ours worked out at around £30-£40 as we used a home printer so only bought, card, hessian, ribbon glue etc and in my opinion the invites looked really nice and venue appropriate as we had a barn so shabby chic look.

Favours

Wedding favours is another area you can save money by preparing them yourselves. Depending on your style of wedding there's so much you can do, we had home made jam. we bought the jars in bulk on eBay for cheap and we bought an off cut of material to decorate them and I made the name tags myself using left over card, my printer and some garden string. The favours also doubled up as the place names. Lots of people do something simple like sweets, a little candle, garden seeds, there are so many options and this is more of a small gesture. you don't need to spend a fortune. All in we spent around £40 on our favours.

Table decorations

If you get all your flowers from a florist you will end up spending a small fortune! because our wedding was shabby chic all our centre pieces were different and most of them were sourced from granddads and great uncles lofts so didn't cost anything. Charity shops and car boots are great places for sourcing items like this for next to nothing. In regards to the flowers we went to marks and Spencer the morning before and bought about 4 bunches of flowers to use to decorate our centre pieces. We must have saved hundreds of pounds by doing this.

For our table numbers we collected empty wine bottles and painted them with chalk board paint and then wrote the table number on in chalk and simply dressed it with some string and a white rose.

For our ceremony room we used different wicker hearts and on the table we simply had a photo of each of our parents on their wedding day with a candle wrapped in lace.

Dresses and suits

I bought my bridesmaid dresses online from a high street shop they cost me around £50 each and matched our venue perfectly. I then asked my bridesmaids to provide their own shoes. all i specified was nude.

Because our groomsmen were all family and we didn't want tails we asked the men to buy their own suits as we knew they would all wear them again. They cost £100 each for a 3 piece suit including alterations. This is a really good option if you feel comfortable doing so and you can often get a deal for a large purchase. We had 7 to buy.

Makeup

Don't feel that you have to get a professional to do your makeup. We did ours ourselves but my bridesmaid is very good at makeup. A friend of mine paid to go on a makeup course which cost around £30 so she could do her own wedding makeup. Its also ok to just have yours done and not pay for your bridesmaids.

No Corkage

We were super lucky that our venue allowed you to provide your own drinks during the day. We bulk bought wine when it was on offer. we spent around £500 on all our alcohol including prosecco for the toast and some beers. You can get some great offers when you're buying cases. Ours came from Marks and Spencer (online) and Tesco.

Transport

If your wedding is all in one venue (which a lot are now) you don't need to fork out loads of money for a car. Pull in a favour from a friend or family member with a nice car. I'm super lucky that my dad has a classic car so he drove me in that and my god father drove my bridesmaids.

My best advise would be to set your budget at the start. Decide which items you don't want to scrimp on. (Your dress, bouquet, venue) and then work around that. You can find so many ideas and tutorials on pintrest to help you.