Nuts and Bolts and Tulle

The date was set and now we needed to figure out exactly what The Day would entail. Even though we live in the prestigious “Wine Country” of Sonoma County, we are not wealthy. When we first started planning we looked up the average cost of a wedding in our area and it ranged between $24,000 and $40,000! For us, it might as well have been a million dollars; we simply don’t have that kind of money. As we added up the cost of each of the main elements we wanted, though, we began to understand how easy it could be to overspend even on a simple wedding. The challenge for us, then, was how could we avoid spending that much money?

I suggested that we could afford $5000. In one of his only contributions to wedding decision making, my husband agreed. Whatever $5000 could buy, that’s what we’d do for our daughter. She, in turn, generously offered to help with expenses, but as a full-time student with part-time work, her contribution would be limited. Since none of us wanted to overburden our checkbooks or add too much to our credit card debt, we all agreed to do our best to stay within the budget. I will say right now that we amended our cost estimate twice before The Day arrived.

"Can you imagine? They think they can put on a wedding for $5000!"

Working with the $5000 cost limit we listed the main elements of a wedding according to what we felt we must have and what we could do without. In no particular order, the "must have" elements were:

• The Dress
• The Photographer
• The Invitations
• The Flowers
• The Reception Venue
• The Food
• The Cake

The ones we felt we could do without mostly because the bride and groom didn’t want them or we knew we couldn’t afford them were:

• Band or DJ
• Limousine
• Videographer 
• Alcohol

The next step for me was to make a spreadsheet. I used Excel to mock up an itemized budget with estimated costs for 150, 200, and 250 guests. From there we could adjust expenses as necessary. This became an ongoing task and updated figures were plugged in until two weeks before The Day. At that point I declared, “Whatever we’re spending, we’re spending!”

For myself, The Photographer was the one element on which I was not willing to economize. For my daughter it was The Dress. Everything else, however, was fair game for being home made. This isn’t to say we didn’t shop around to see if we could find professionals to do the work for us.

We started with The Invitations. After spending several hours poring over hundreds of samples at a local stationery store and scouring the internet for deals, we took our discount coupons to Michael’s and bought do-it-yourself wedding invitations.

We researched several professional bakers who specialized in wedding cakes. All of them charged between $4 to $6 per slice which meant that making a cake to feed 200 guests would cost between $800 to $1200! I knew for a fact that the ingredients couldn’t possibly add up to more than $150 for a cake that size and simply couldn’t justify the expense. I purchased cake pans in various sizes and started reading up on how to construct tiered wedding cakes. I even considered taking some Wilton cake decorating classes at our local craft store.

My daughter began researching the kind of bridal bouquet she wanted at local florist shops but, after several unsuccessful attempts to get information from the sales clerks regarding ordering flowers, she checked out books from the library on how to make bouquets, corsages, and boutonnieres and decided to make them herself. She also decided that she really didn’t want a ton of fresh flowers for decorations. Whatever we saved on The Flowers, then, could be applied somewhere else.

Right from the beginning we intended to do The Food ourselves and I had a plan. I was certain I could feed 250 people for $500 and, truth be told, I came very close!

The final detail was to find The Reception Venue that would seat between 200 to 250 guests. A local community center, which was conveniently located less than a mile from where we lived, seemed like the logical place to have our reception. After taking a tour of the facility, though, we were given a cost estimate of $2700 for the use of their ballroom for eight hours. The ballroom seated 300 for dinner but the facility only provided silverware for 150 and we were not allowed to bring in any from the outside. Go figure. Other rooms in town were in the $1200 to $3500 range. Although it would cost us nothing, the largest room at our church could only seat 165 for dinner, and that was cafeteria style and tightly packed. Not very elegant.

We were left with a challenge regarding the reception venue: either increase the amount we were willing to spend or tackle the guest list again and reduce the number of guests so that we could fit into the room at church. Or -- back to the drawing board -- change the date of the wedding to a warmer time of year and have the reception outside at church. We had some decisions to make…