About Me

Monday, July 23, 2012

Our wedding :]


I don't know about you guys but I love hearing stories about a significant time in someone else's life. You know...how they met their spouse, how they got engaged, all the drama leading up to their wedding day, their crazy labor and delivery story.... all the juicy stuff. I'm thinking it's because I'm the only one of all my cousins and siblings to go through any of this stuff, and I don't have very many friends that went through it either. So I decided it's my turn to share some of my stories with you, the ones I promised would be so worth you while. For the next couple of days (but mostly today because I have the time) I'll let you get a sneak peek into the best and worst times of my life, all the drama, all the juicy details you'll get it all.  Today I'm going to start with our wedding day and the 11 drama filled months that led up to one of the best days of my life :]


This is the night it all started... Christmas of 2010. I somehow convinced this awesome guy that I was the wifey type and he proposed!! But we'll get to that story later....
If I would have known how much stress, time and money went into a wedding of 100 hundred people I would have taken off to Vegas the same night we got engaged and just got hitched!! Instead, the girl who has been to like one wedding in her entire life, decided she was going to plan a wedding from scratch! 

So to start things off right we traveled to Florida (where my entire family lifes)in February to show Johnny off to the family! Poor guy, he had to spend 9 days straight with a bunch a crazy strangers, sleeping at my aunts house every night, and getting introduced to a new person everyday. But he passed the test...and we flew back to Arizona with everyone's blessing...my guy is pretty charming :] 
Here's my cousins on my dad's side and one of my uncles....

When we came back it was nothing but hard work, after all we were only 19 at the time and we were paying for this wedding on our own so we picked up extra hours at work, cut back completely on eating out and buying extra things for ourselves. We originally thought we could get by with only spending about $3,000 on our entire wedding. HA HA HA!! What a joke, I think the final estimate of what we spent was $10,000, not including the money we spent for our honeymoon AND the financial help we got from my mommy and step-dad. (thank god for awesome parents!)
Originally we were going to get married in September because after a little research I figured this would be the cheapest time to book hotels and flights for the honeymoon, a venue to get married in and any other rentals we would need because NOTHING happens in September. No holidays or family birthdays and also the weather would be nice for Arizona. Unfortunately, our lease on our apartment was up in September and we were going to be moving to a new place so September got vetoed.
Here comes dumb bride moment #2....

We decided to get married November 11, you know 11-11-11. If I could go back in time I would flick the old me right in the head because this day gave us a TON of trouble! Do you know how hard it is to book ANYTHING on such a popular day??? Ay ay ay. But this was the day we picked so we went with it. After calling multiple venue's and getting turned down because they had been booked for over a year for this day (head flick!) we found a perfect little place that I had actually been to before. A very simple little place that we could spruce up with our own ideas and decorations that also fit perfectly in our price range, we snatched this place up ASAP. Mhhhmmm I can work with this...


Now how was I going to decorate this place??? I spent hours looking up ideas online, I had no clue how I wanted this place to look, I wasn't one of those girls who planned every detail of their wedding since they were 5 years old....I wish pinterest was around about a year sooner. I didn't have a ton of help because no one wanted to tell how they thought I should do my wedding (understandable) and my mommy is more of a small wedding kind of lady, so this was mostly all on me. I also wanted to DIY as many decorations as I could to save money, and we were going to be decorating the place ourselves. Things finally started happening when a friend from work offered to make ALL my flower arrangements, and she made a sample centerpiece for me. 
Here they are on our tables, and you can kind of see our plate settings, with the favors sitting on top. I loved the centerpieces so much that I wanted to add these flower balls (that's what I called them) with the same type of flowers to some of the chairs going down the aisle.
They ended up looking like this :] We also added the chair covers and purple sashes, that are a little wrinkled because they got delivered like 3 hours late...but I still love the look.

The rest of the decorations were pretty simple and low cost... tons of tulle to make archways and benches look pretty, sparkly pink butterflies here and there for a feminine touch (my favorite!) twinkly lights, candles,  flowers and little crystals on the tops of the tables...




I really don't have a lot of pictures of every little decoration we had at the wedding, and that would be because of dumb bride moment #3.

I hired our photographers ONE WEEK before the wedding. One week people!! Long story short, I didn't think we needed a professional, I figured family would take tons of pictures (WRONG!) and one of my husbands friends from high school was going to come and take some good pictures for us for really cheap. Ummmm ya... that didn't work out at all about a month before the wedding she let us know she was going to be late for the ceremony because she had to work. PANIC!! Luckily, the girl who did my sister-in-laws wedding photo's was free, so her and the lady she was learning from made us a sweet deal for our wedding day photos. We met these people the day before our wedding, during our wedding rehearsal, which was a disaster of a day. They really didn't get the time to sit down with me and ask what I wanted and what was most important to be photographed like they would a normal client. But overall I loved our wedding pictures, the captured the most important moments which is what it's all about!

Stay tuned for more....

2 comments:

  1. So pretty!! Thanks for sharing :) P.S. Thought you might be interested in the giveaway that I'm hosting for Panera :) xo www.domesticsweetheart.com

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  2. more coming soon :]

    I saw your post and I wish I would loooovvveee to participate (I'm obsessed with Panera) but the closest Panera is like 250 miles away from me :[

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