DIY Life

Last week, I introduced the kickoff feature post for Wedstravaganza. This week, I'll delve into the initial preparations that my wife and I were kicked, pushed and pulled into once we decided to get married in all of five weeks. As stated this time last week, the lack of time gave us the opportunity (or forced us, heh) to plan every detail from scratch while turning our now-home into a wedding plan headquarters. We survived with what many people told us was the prettiest wedding they had ever attended. How did we do it? Keep reading here every Wednesday, and I'll lay it all out for ya!


To start off, I proposed to my then-girlfriend on the eve of our first-year anniversary as a couple. No flashy propoal out in public (we're not into that), but we did have dinner that evening at the highest point in our town (Oklahoma City). It's a location on top of the tallest skyscraper in the downtown area -- the place we had met almost a year earlier to the day. Nothing like re-creating that special moment a year later. But, I saved the ring and the proposal for after we had retired from some good food and a spectacular view in a private dining room. Little did she know it...

You see, we had met one year earlier at a wedding reception in the very same place, so we decided to celebrate a year together there in private. Once our evening out was over, we returned back home to relax with each other and just chill in that fresh, not-so-hot June evening. After a half-hour or so, I created one of my strawberry margaritas (her favorite) with a Cracker Jack-esque surprise: an engagement ring in the bottom. It took five minutes or so, but when she found it, the moment had finally come, and she said yes. That night was th start of our journey to plan and execute the wedding of our dreams. Little did we know what was in store.

The next day was spent whittling down wedding location candidates. In other words, we wasted no time. In order for my now-wife to fit in a wedding and honeymoon before her elementary school year started, we had to act fast -- or plan for a wedding in a year (during next summer's vacation period). Well, needless to say, we both could not wait that long, so using trusty ole' Google, we began searching for wedding locations.

By the following Monday, we had appointments to looks at two locations in suburbs of the Oklahoma City area. After spending the afternoon viewing both, we knew that we had found our place. It was stunning, the offered services were perfect, the price (so far) was right and a date was available at the start of August. We were blown away that one of the most beautiful places we had ever been too had a date open so soon. So, after a few hours of toying with our own minds in making a decision, we called and booked our dream location with a down payment.

So, we now had August 3rd tied down as our wedding day. Gee, only five short weeks away! At this point, I began becoming Excel-crazy, as I started laying out the organization of all the projects we'd have to get on (like, yesterday) to pull this wedding off in the fashion we wanted with such a shortage of time. First up: pulling together family mailing lists from three sources and verifying addresses. While we had family members working on that, we scurried down to the tuxedo rental shop to square that first project away, and chose/ordered specific wedding invitations at the same time.

Only a day had passed since we alerted our families to the news, so we had a good feeling for how many collective people would make it to the final wedding invitation list, although we did not have a finalized listing yet. So, we ordered 150 invitations to cover ourselves and put an overnight rush on the order so we didn't waste a day that we didn't really have anyway.

We were off -- the wedding invite list came together (thanks to email and several spreadsheets), the invitations came in the next day, and we set down with some help from my mom in particular to get all those invitations addressed and mailed. Even all the stamps we needed to mail all the invites and to apply to the RSVP cards was a project. Guess what? A budget tracker was needed, so I grudgingly began another Excel sheet to start tracking costs. Even in the frenzy of planning a wedding, you gotta know where you're at financially or things can get out of control quickly, right?

Next week, I'll take you into the next steps beyond the invitations, tuxedo rentals, budget spreadsheet preparation and mailing project and into the flower and color selections, cake selections, wedding dress shopping, the ordering of our table favors and cake toppers and I'll cinch up week three of Wedstravaganza with details on each of these areas. Check back next Wednesday, and until then, take a breath with me, will ya?