Saving The Date

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Garrett + I have been pretty useless on the wedding planning front since we got engaged. If you listed out all of our combined strengths, party planning probably wouldn’t even make it in to the top 100. While we are both super excited to get married, we haven’t been super pumped to get the ball rolling with like, actual wedding planning. Even Pinterest can’t save us.

We’ve looked at a few places, and liked all of them actually, but no place has really lit that fire inside us to make us want to spend our hard earned time and cash to have a party there. It’s not that we couldn’t imagine getting married at any of these places, it’s just that we’ve walked out of most of them feeling overwhelmed by the amount of tasks we’d have to add to the To-Do list by committing to any of them.

We’ve considered eloping, and walked through a number of different scenarios that all sounded neat but just not quite right. We’re excited. We want to celebrate. We want to start this new phase of our life with the family and friends that have supported us along the way so running off and getting hitched has seemed enticing but also not quite a fit. We’ve tossed around the destination wedding idea but ultimately ruled that idea out as well.

We’ve been hand wringing about how other people make it look so easy to just throw together a wedding, and thought to ourselves “How can we be relatively competent intelligent people who are in love and have NO IDEA OR DESIRE to pick venues or colors or attire or first dance songs?” but the answers haven’t come.

Finally in October we looked at the calendar and realized we were going to a wedding every single weekend that month (well, except one and on that weekend I was going to a baby shower! ha!) For our sanity we took the entire month off thinking about any sort of nuptial progress. But as November started we realized that we’ve been engaged almost 6 months and we’ve made absolutely zero progress.

Until today.

On Friday we made a super last minute appointment to check out a venue about 30 minutes away from our house. We headed out this morning feeling a little anxious and with zero expectations and when we left we couldn’t stop talking about ideas and thoughts and details and things to follow up on. There was a different energy there and we both left feeling like maybe we had found the spot. After a few hours of doing errands and other things we ran through all challenges of the place and all the reasons we thought it could work, and in the end we emailed the coordinator to actually reserve a specific date.

We still have two weeks to download and think about it before we have to sign any contracts or hand over any cash, but you guys: I THINK WE HAVE A WEDDING DATE. More to come when everything is finalized, but it feels like pretty exciting limbo to be in and honestly there was a huge feeling of relief to think about having a big decision in the process nailed down. It’s been a nice way to start November, and heck at this time next year we could totally be hitched!

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20 Responses to Saving The Date

  1. Yay! Glad to see you posting and so exciting about finding a venue. I think that’s one of the biggest tasks 🙂

    • Holly says:

      I feel SO RELIEVED to finally have one piece of the puzzle sort of in place. Here’s to hoping it only gets easier. 🙂

  2. april says:

    How exciting! It’s hard to get started, but now that you have the ball rolling I hope it keeps going for you!

  3. Carrey says:

    So happy for you! As someone who has been planning a wedding for the last year (ours is on 12/13/14), let me tell you that know one “throws together a wedding” with ease. I’ve never had to deal with this many details, and hopefully, I never will again. Take heart that those people who made it look easy probably had at least 2-3 freakouts/meltdowns. As you go through the process, remember something I wish I had known at the beginning: Even small, simple weddings are difficult to plan. There’s just a mountain of details and a river of rabbit-holes to go through. It’s the nature of the beast. It will be a lot of work, but your wedding will be fantastic.

  4. whitney says:

    Yay! Figuring out where was a big hurdle for us too (also not really into the whole wedding planning thing)!

  5. Alex says:

    Totally related to this. I’ve been engaged since December 2013 and our wedding is August 2015. I have friends who have been engaged for far less time and have EVERYTHING planned and I’m like…is there something wrong with me or what? I’m super excited to marry my best friend, I just kind of flop in the detail department. And a lot of times I get overwhelmed and just sort of quit (not my usual approach to life, just to wedding planning). So effective.

  6. Maureen says:

    I’m so happy you found a place you love for the wedding!!

    So in 10 months???

  7. Sizzle says:

    Once you save the date/book the venue, you can move quickly with other decisions. I say this as a professional event planner. 😉 Excited for you guys!!

  8. Sara says:

    I get where you’re coming from as far as wedding planning is concerned because you guys are totally my fiance! We got engaged at the end of June and the freak planner that I am immediately had us looking at reception sites. He was like “We just got engaged, can’t we just enjoy that?” Me “If you want to get married in two years then yes, let’s do that!” Because of his work 4 months out of the year were totally out so I knew we had to move fast. The moment we found our reception site we knew as well and then he was finally ready to say “I want to do this for our wedding!” when before he was all “Oh yeah that sounds fine I don’t have any opinions.” It’s a process but a fun one and I’ve enjoyed every step of the way to our big day. (Rhyme unintended) I’m excited to read more about your wedding!

  9. K says:

    This is so exciting!

    (I wanted to put this in all caps but that seemed kind of…aggressively excited.)

  10. Aw yay! I’m so happy for you guys. Unfortunately Jake seems to think that weddings do just get thrown together. His parents planned their wedding in less than two months so he thinks they must be no big deal….waiting for him to actually pop the question so I can show him just how wrong he is.
    Also I’ve definitely suggested to him that we should just get hitched in Vegas. At first I thought it was corny but then I realized I could wear the most bling-ed out, covered in diamonds, ridiculous little white dress. Works for me.

    • Holly says:

      Yeah, Garrett once said to me “Let’s just have a low key wedding and only invite like 200 of our closest friends.” And then I died laughing. BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH He gets it now. 🙂

  11. Tiffany says:

    So glad you are posting again and congrats on the venue! I had the hardest time planning a wedding last year. As a 38 year old first time bride who had already been living with her boyfriend for many years, I didn’t have visions of a big, grand wedding. Nor did I see myself as some fairy-tale bride. I just wanted a celebration with my family and friends. Once we picked the venue (an old citrus packing plant) and the date (a Thursday evening!) everything else just kind of fell into place and the theme of more celebration, less formal wedding came into play. It was a fun night! I know yours will be too!

  12. KellyBrown says:

    That’s how our wedding was! And seriously, go small….we had 55 of our cloesest friends and family there and we could EASILY have cut 10 of those family members and had friends. We ended up getting married at the Two Brothers Roundhouse just outside of Chicago with all organic food and all microbrewed beer for super cheap. I’m glad we ended up waiting til we found the right place! Congrats:)

  13. Maura says:

    Holly – you are not alone. I am a teacher, aka, planner of every minute of every day. I can plan the heck out of a class and curriculum, but I was so unmotivated to plan my wedding. I had no dream or vision. There were so many things that felt obligatory that I didn’t care about. While we did pick a date and a venue fairly quickly, I was so indecisive about colors and themes and favors and welcome bags. And like you said, Pinterest really can’t save you! So we said screw it to all those things we didn’t care about. We didn’t do some things and we didn’t have a theme or colors (our wedding party of 2 ladies was told to pick a dress that people would tell them they looked fabulous in). But another commenter is right – once you have a venue and a date, you can really focus into the things you care about – whatever those are for you. And ask your mom, siblings, and friends to take care of the other stuff whenever possible.

    Congrats on progress!

  14. angela says:

    So exciting!!!! I’m a wedding/party planning fool. So if you need free labor holler.

  15. sarah says:

    So happy!! Let me know if you need help, or just to vent! Can’t wait to celebrate with you two. And I’m with Maura, cut out the things you and G don’t care about, it will save you a ton of stress and probably a wad of cash too.