Backyard Weddings: Budget Friendly & Fun!

Photo c/o Affordable Utah Weddings

I love the idea of getting married at your/your parents/neighbors/some else's home. The setting feels more personal and most likely has sentimental value for your family. Also, your guests may feel more conformable being that it's not a fancy venue and they may have already spent time there!

If I had a big backyard (or a backyard at all!) I would definitely had considered having our wedding there. After all, S and I went all the way upstate to find a "backyard feel."

Backyard weddings could also be very budget friendly! Obviously you don't need to pay for your venue, which usually carries a fee. Next, if you are having a small enough reception, you could get by on using your own china and asking friends to borrow wine glasses/extra silverware. It would make for a great eclectic mix! If you are fortunate to have lovely landscaping on your property or a garden you can scratch flowers off your list! You will have natural flower arrangements (which you could possibly clip for really pretty bouquets!). Also, depending on the size of your guest list, and your friends/family, you may be able to cut the catering bill by having the food prepared in the house!

I love how this lovely couple planned their wedding at their own house!

All photos by Young House Love

Getting Your Friends & Family Involved

Since Husband and I were on a budget, we needed all the help we could get. That included begging, tricking, and bribing our friends to volunteer their amazing skills and time. Thankfully, it didn't take much!

It goes without saying that S and I have incredibly talented friends. We are lucky to be surrounded by the most creative, imaginative people. Even though we had a vision for our wedding aesthetic, it was thanks to all of them that we could translate that vision into the beautiful details that made our day so perfect!

So now you may be asking, "How can I get my friends and family to help me?!!! (without having them hate me by the end of it.)"

Here are some fun and inexpensive ways to trick, er, I mean graciously entice your beloved network of amazing people to contribute in planning for your most special day:

1. Food. This is the best way to get people to help you. It has been proven to work 100% of the time. Trust me on this one. Invite your friends over for snacks and writing out table cards. Writing out 143 names does not sound that exciting. An ice cream sundae night does! Invite a few people over for a Crafty Brunch! Fix up some waffles and coffee while your friends are stuffing envelopes.

2. Margaritas/Wine/Pick Your Poison. No one wants to come over on a Tuesday evening, after work, and help you and your beloved make wedding favors. However, pick up a bottle of inexpensive wine, or mix up a pitcher of sangria and it may be easier to sway someone! Not a drinker? Pick up some fancy tea or prepare some good coffee! I've even known a few people who could easily be persuaded by a late night milkshake...

3. Do It Outside. If you have the luxury of having a deck/yard/roof/stoop, lucky you! No one wants to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon cooped up in your house. Take it outside! As long as the sun is shining and you don't need an electrical outlet, you're all set! It will make the experience much more pleasant.

4. Beg/Plead/Bribe. I'm half serious when I say this but there were moments when S and I were so stressed out and overwhelmed that we would do anything for a few extra hands and boy, were we thankful that we had them!

Lastly, remember that these are the people that love you! They want your wedding to be amazing/perfect/go-off-without-a-hitch just as much as you both do! It probably won't take much to convince your friends and family to help you out but the point is to just be thankful. You may think you can do it all on your own, and you probably could, but having your loved ones there makes it so much more special. And who knows, they may have an idea or two that you will love (just as our friends did!). I will end this post by saying (again!) that when we walked into the barn on our wedding day, S and I were overwhelmed with a feeling of graciousness by seeing all the beautiful and amazing contributions from everyone around us and all the love that went into making our day special. It made it that much more meaningful for us, and I hope for them too! If not, at least they got some margaritas out of it!

Wedding dessert idea or summer treat!

From the beginning of our planning S and I decided we didn't want a standard wedding. We don't do many things standard so why should that be any different for our wedding? Since our wedding was a bit unconventional anyway, it wasn't difficult to change or omit certain things. The first thing to go was the wedding cake. I'm not a big fan of cake and S isn't too keen on towers of dessert so we agreed! We had decided on a summer bbq theme so it was easy to choose fun desserts that our guests would love just as much (or more!) than wedding cake. Anyway, who wants to worry about melting frosting in mid June?! Not me. If you are someone who also prefers something delicious over a mouthful of buttercream frosting, here's an easy and tasty dessert idea for your wedding or for right now!

Grilled Peaches with Goat Cheese & Honey Drizzle

1. Wash peach, cut in half, and remove pit.

2. Drizzle with lemon juice and a bit of honey (depending on your sweetness preference).

3. At this point you could either grill the peaches (delicious!) or pop them in the toaster oven/oven.

4. After about 10 minutes the peaches should be soft and just releasing their juices.

5. Put a scoop of your favorite goat cheese in the center and return to the grill/oven for 1 minute.

6. Plate peach and drizzle with honey.

7. Garnish with a mint leave serve.

8. Enjoy!

Another delicious way to prepare this is with fresh summer herbs like lavender, rosemary, and thyme. Herbs work beautifully with stone fruits like peaches. Just sprinkle some in step two before grilling/toasting. Yum!

Finding your perfect wedding venue.

Photos by Chad Hunt

S and I got engaged in April of 2008. We didn't visit the barn until August. Before we decided we wanted to get married there, we looked at several other locations in New York, where we live. We looked at a variety of venues including loft spaces, restaurants, event spaces, and old steel foundry, a park, and a community garden near our home. We settled on our lovely barn because in the end, we decided we wanted to get out of the city and there was no where around here we could achieve that same rustic charm.

Even though the barn was priced a bit higher than we estimated in our budget, we didn't want to settle on another place and could not imagine getting married anywhere else at that point. So, we played around with our budget, cut out some things we didn't really need, and made it work! We had our perfect dream location set!

You've got a budget...now what??

So, you've searched for the perfect setting, you've made your lists, and you have an idea of how much you have (or don't have) to spend on your dream wedding. Now what do you do? Well, it's pretty simple really. You just have to break it down for yourself!

Now that you have your list set and you know roughly how much you want to spend on different elements of your wedding, you can see if those individual costs fit within your estimated budget. A good way to do this is to make a spreadsheet! S and I sat down and made one pretty early on and trust me, it helped a lot! It saved us a lot of time trying to decide whether or not we could afford something. We would plug it into the budget and see if we were over or not.

S and I started out by making a list of categories (i.e. flowers, catering, alcohol) and putting estimated amounts next to each category and our grand total/budget at the bottom. Whenever something was finalized, meaning we booked a vendor and were sure of the total cost, that item then became bold so we knew it could not change. We could then play around with our other "estimates" to see how much we had left in the other categories. It became sort of like a puzzle. Not too fun at times, but made it much easier to see all the numbers together on one page and how they added up.

To get you started, Husband and I have put up a sample spreadsheet to get you started. Included are some of the categories that we used but feel free to add your own.

Download file here.

Planning your wedding budget...It's not as difficult as you think!

Even though my own wedding is over, I am still enjoying helping all my friends with their upcoming nuptials. Being that I'm a newlywed of recent, I still feel as if I'm in frantic wedding planning mode. My cousin is planning her wedding this year as is my very best friend (and amazing maid-of-honor!). As I am thinking of them both now where I was about a year ago, I started thinking about how Husband and I came to begin our planning process.

Set a budget! It's not as difficult as you may think!

The simplest was to decide on a budget is to make a list and prioritize which elements of your wedding are the most important to you both. If you can't imagine not having flowers dripping from every nook then put it at the top of your list. If you could care less whether or not you have fancy favors for your guests, you could itemize that towards the bottom of your list. This way, when it comes to making important decisions about whether or not you can afford something, it will be easier for you both to to visualize your guests dancing to your rocking band over choosing that pricy wedding cake.

After prioritizing your list, research items at the top of your list. In the case of S and I, our venue was most important to us. We started out by looking at several venues in and around our area and compared prices. Once we had an idea of how much similar venues were charging, we could gauge how much we would have left in our budget for other necessities (catering, decor, etc.).

Don't get overwhelmed! Husband and I had no idea how to even begin the process. Once we committed to our beautiful barn we knew about how much we had to work with, which made it a bit easier (although no more enjoyable) to cut back in other areas.

If you are lost as to how to begin the process or not sure how to set a budget, this is a good guide to get you started!