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Amanda Manupella Photography

Moving to a new home during wedding planning is stressful: Make sure to plan carefully

Planning a wedding is an exciting but stressful endeavor. You have to get everything done on a short timeline, and hope that it all falls into place and everyone is happy. If you’re buying a house in the middle of all that, your stress level can shoot way up: Not only do you have to find the perfect house and sign on the dotted line, you also have to move!

There are ways to get everything done without losing your mind, but you have to be pretty good at planning. Your weekends are probably going to be pretty busy for a while.

Consider your finances: Paying for a wedding and a new house can put a strain on your budget. Make sure you plan for both. Have a firm budget for your wedding and stick to it. If you use credit cards to pay for wedding items and services, make those payments on schedule to remain in good credit standing for your home purchase. Prioritize your wedding must-haves and keep within your budget or you may regret it later. Search Pinterest for ways you can add a DIY touch while knowing where you should spend your money on wedding professionals. Your long-term goal of home-ownership should be properly prioritized along with your wedding plans and budget.  With that said, put a firm cap on your home purchase, too. Know exactly what you can afford before you buy.

If you have a lot of work to do on the house, consider hiring a contractor. According to HomeAdvisor, the average price to remodel a kitchen is $11,951 to $25,009, with a project timeline of six to seven weeks. HomeAdvisor also has a helpful list of the highest-rated kitchen remodelers in Virginia Beach to help you get your money’s worth. It’s important to know what you can afford to do before you buy a fixer-upper. With that said, it can save you money buying a lower-priced home and slowly making renovations. You just have to know what you want before you buy. If you’re super-handy, you can save money by doing it yourself, but you don’t want to have to worry about it in the middle of planning for your big day.

Use your wedding registry: Consider your needs, and add them to your wedding registry. That will help you get what you need instead of too much of one thing. Remember that you might get money as a gift for your wedding, which might change the amount of your down payment for your home purchase. If you think you might get enough to make a difference, consider waiting until after the wedding to make your down payment.

Make sure you and your fiance have discussed your financial goals together. If only one of you wants an elaborate wedding and the other wants to focus on saving and buying a house, you’re likely to have some trouble down the line. Work out some compromises together, and then stick to the plan. Honor each other’s needs, and you’ll be more likely to drift into wedded bliss.

When it’s time to move, make sure you agree on where your items are going. If you haven’t lived together before, finding space for the items of two people can be a challenge. Make sure one of you isn’t losing all his or her stuff while the other takes over. That can cause one person to not feel at home in the new space. Be willing to compromise for the sake of your spouse’s happiness.

With a little advanced planning, you and your new spouse can make a smooth transition into your new home. Before long, you’ll be hosting cookouts and family gatherings in your space, and your friends and family will help you make beautiful memories.

Guest blogger,  Julie Morris

It’s done! It’s here!! We are SO excited that we can hardly contain ourselves!

After months of planning, filming, and editing, our buddies at Ebb+Flow Productions have helped us create an inside look at the Emily Weddings team in action. We have looked high and low and haven’t been able to find anything like this before, which makes this even more exciting for us. Creatives, you get us, right? Doing something that hasn’t been done before makes you do a happy dance!

The inspiration for this video comes from the many stories we’ve heard about couples’ regrets over their wedding day. So much of what we hear could have been easily avoided by having an experienced, qualified wedding planning professional coordinate their dream wedding. Those same couples are the ones who told themselves, “We don’t need the added expense of a wedding planner. Let’s just do it ourselves. How hard can it be?”

So we got to thinking… If those couples could have seen what it takes to execute a wedding well (like watching the Emily Weddings team in action), would they have chosen to hire a professional planning team and not put that pressure on their family, their friends, or themselves?

You know the saying “hindsight is 20/20”? It’s not until the day is done that these couples “get it.” The lightbulb goes off. They realize what mad chaos they took on in planning and executing what they hoped would be their dream wedding. Not only were their dreams unfulfilled, they didn’t get to enjoy it. Ugh…seriously hard for us to hear! You can even find reality wedding shows about doing the wedding over because, unfortunately, this is all too common. Some also confuse the venue coordinator as a day-of coordinator (a costly mistake), which we helped clear up in another post.

We can sit and share stories upon stories with you of why you need a planner or at least a day-of coordinator, but after much thought why not just show you in a video? Emily Weddings does everything we possibly can to give you FOREsight so as to avoid the dreaded “hindsight is 20/20” statement. We care about you, your wedding day, and your memories.

We hope this video will provide that foresight into what it takes to get it all done on your wedding day. You now have a firsthand look at the set-up, the tear-down, and everything that flows in between. No bad iPhone camera footage, no spiel behind a desk of us telling you how much there is to do on a wedding day, or us just sitting and telling crazy wedding stories. You get to see a first-hand look at the Emily Weddings Team busting it and having fun the entire time! You get to watch professionals work HARD to make your day the day you’ve always dreamed of.

You will see the village it takes to truly make your wedding flawless. You will see our team climbing ladders, connecting with vendors, handling grass stains on the wedding dress (you wouldn’t believe the unpredictable dilemmas we’ve encountered — and handled with grace and efficiency). You get glimpses of the team troubleshooting, directing, sending the bride down the aisle, and finding lost family members (yup; that happens, too).

This is our pulse, our heartbeat, our passion. Please don’t regret anything. Don’t be a possible candidate for a do-over wedding show. And please don’t allow the phrase “hindsight is 20/20” to become a part of your wedding day description.

Here is your foresight, here is our team…

The Emily Weddings Team from Emily Petersen on Vimeo.

Emily Weddings Team – Photo by Tara Liebeck Photography

What in the world do “Wedding Day-of Services” mean?

We are hoping that this post will be informative an enlightening about the role of a Day-Of Coordinator at your wedding, and clear up any confusion you may have. Many planners offer quite a few wedding packages like Full Service, a Partial Service, or a Day-Of Service, but Day-Of Service is by far the most confusing term…so let’s clear things up.

Full Service Planning is pretty self-explanatory…it is what it says. Most planners will help in every aspect of planning your big day. Big details and small details, they’re involved.  For those overwhelmed, ‘Jesus take the wheel’ brides, this path is one that you may want to consider.  We will be the hand holding, dress shopping, and mother-in-law interference playing friends that you need.

A Partial Planning Service has agreed upon aspects of the planning process that will help you with your big day. This service is really for the couple that needs help navigating through the timeline of getting to their wedding day, but still wants to be very hands-on with the decision making process. So now that we’ve got the definitions of those services clear, let’s move on to the confusing one.

So some questions that we hear in conversations with an inquiring couple for Day-Of Services include (we will answer these a little bit further into the post):

1. But I have done everything so you don’t need to call my vendors because they said they would show up. Just be there to make sure that they do.
2. I just want your team to set up and tear down and make sure everything happens on time, I’ve done all the hard work.
3. My DJ is going to coordinate so we don’t need you to make an itinerary. Just make sure it all works out.

So let’s get down to it…Day-Of Planning Services… seriously, it is a confusing term…we know! Those of us in the wedding industry have never favored this term because we know that there is no such thing as just showing up on your wedding day. Some planners may call it Month-Of Services for this reason, but we have also found that this term causes confusion. Yikes…we can see it now…having a planner just show up the day of your wedding and trying to run with it – could you imagine??

The reason day-of planners get involved on the wedding day is because they want it to run smoothly. To do this they like to be prepared and at-the-ready (most are Type A individuals). Just showing up on the wedding day would be the exact opposite of what a wedding planner would plan to do for you…it would actually be very stressful for even a professional if you think about…and YOU don’t need that stress either! You have put so much into the planning of your wedding day so in reality you DO NOT want a “Day-Of Planner” (going off of the term) to just show up that morning and try to run with your precious wedding day. So…this means prep and lots of it for your Day-Of Service. Yes, even for the role of Day-Of wedding coordinator, it requires time, thought, and planning that happens before the wedding day.

For Day-Of Services, wedding planners start several weeks out meeting with the couple, getting contracts of secured services and items, touching base with all vendors and getting cell numbers for wedding day communication. There are many hours spent developing a detailed timeline and sometimes back-up timelines in case mother nature wants to change her mind. We have seen it first-hand…those darn nor’easters and hurricanes. Hours get poured into this Day-Of Service…for you, for your big day, and you should want it that way. Planners are here to serve you!

Here is how we respond to those statements above that confused couples say to us:

1. You really do need us to call your vendors. We are all human and can easily make mistakes. Having a day-of planner follow up with a wedding vendor to confirm delivery time of items or services is like having extra insurance for your wedding day. We could bend your ear on how many times there has been a small discrepancy in what the couple “thought” and what the vendor was going to do (wrong dates, wrong colors, wrong location, wrong time etc.). Getting everyone on the same page makes your day simply flawless and perfect. If we don’t call to confirm and there is a mix-up with the couple’s agreement with the vendor, we would be the ones trying to fix it at the last minute (that can cause heart palpitations…trust us) and it would ultimately be on us. So as to cover our bases and stand by our professional reputation, we must connect with your wedding vendors.
2. Yes, planning your wedding is hard work and we applaud you for the time and dedication you have put into the planning process. That is all the more reason why you want us to execute your day flawlessly. Creating the timeline and connecting with vendors, setting up (sometimes in under two hours around the same time you are getting ready for your ceremony at possibly another location), making sure events happen on time and making the evening flow perfectly without any lows, packing up and cleaning up, all take time. In fact, it’s a minimum of about 20 hours of work for us. Work we pour into your wedding because of your hard hours of planning. We promise you, you wouldn’t want less than that kind of dedication for your day-of service.  We care about your day as much as you do, and want to be aware of every last planning detail – the hours you spent on that Pinterest board finding the perfect shade of coastal blue, the lengthy cake tasting until you decided on the buttercream frosting, the e-mails back and forth with the florist until your centerpieces were just right – we want to make sure that these months, perhaps even years of planning will all come together for you on one day.
3. We love working with deejays and bands. They are truly artists that ensure folks at your wedding reception have the time of their life celebrating y’all! Can a deejay or band put together an order of events for the reception (first dance, toasts, bouquet/garter toss)? Sure. (We will just say, as a small precaution, that it is VERY obvious when it is a seasoned professional verses a newby in the industry who, if they have to, develop the order of events. So please, please choose wisely and go with a seasoned professional because it makes a HUGE difference in the flow of your reception…but we digress). We are confident in saying that you can ask professional wedding bands and professional deejays if they would prefer having a, at a minimum, day-of coordinator present at your wedding, and they would say emphatically, yes! They need to focus on their music, and you want them to. Coordinators can walk around the reception room, they can know when a special family member (mom, dad, grandma etc.) has stepped out, and quickly get them back in the room for your cake cutting. Coordinators can know if something has happened with the bride’s dress and she needs to excuse herself from the reception for a bit which may delay the next event on a music professional’s timeline. The day-of coordinator is the go-between for communicating with the band or deejay if something needs to get pushed up or pushed back. This keeps your music professional entertaining your guests without having to focus on outside details that could distract. We know they would tell you that they would prefer having those extra eyes, ears, and assistance so they can do what you paid them to do without skipping a beat (no pun intended…okay maybe..ha!).

So to wrap this up, a day-of coordinator takes care of most every aspect of your wedding day so it runs smoothly (they don’t just set up decor and leave). This requires prior planning and coordinating with all of your vendors. It requires hours of time and energy for your big day. It takes a seasoned professional to be both type A on the timeline, and then to roll with the punches and be flexible on your wedding day. If you choose not to have a Full Service Planner or even a Partial Planner, please do not leave your wedding day to chance and mishap by not securing a professional Day-Of Coordinator. A coordinator wants to see all your hard hours of planning brought to full expectation on your wedding day!

Photo by Tara Liebeck Photography, Coordinated by Emily Weddings