Spurred on by the collective genius of Pinterest, Do-It-Yourself weddings have had brides and grooms swaddling Baby’s-breath in mason jars for years now. But it hasn’t always been this way. Weddings on a budget have long had a DIY element to them, but planners and vendors once had much more of a foothold.
Many brides are creative souls who relish the idea of organising and decorating their event. Often their weddings are beautiful affairs, full of imagination and personal touches. What nobody tells you before you embark on a DIY wedding, however, is just how much sanity you’ll need to sacrifice to pull off such a mammoth undertaking. DIY weddings will certainly give you a crash course in event planning and management, but it’s important to consider in advance what kind of impact that level of involvement will mean for your enjoyment of the actual day.
Here we look at seven things to consider before heading down the aisle homemade-style, so you can decide whether a DIY wedding is more stress than it’s worth for you, and where it will pay to seek help!
A DIY wedding may be more stress than it’s worth if you…
1. Have Bad Time Management
“It’ll be fine, I love arts and crafts!”, you say convincingly to your other half twelve months out from the big day. But this is arts and crafts on an epic scale. Prepare for paper cuts and callouses!
By all means make table settings, invitations, and origami favour boxes yourself. Just don’t be under any illusion you’ll still be enjoying yourself when, the night before your wedding, you’re hand-cutting two hundred snowflakes from crepe paper because your table settings cannot function without them. Pick your battles and buy fully-formed decorations wherever possible.
2. Can’t Stick to a Strict Budget
One of the main reasons people go DIY is to bring down wedding costs. This is all very well, but unless you are an accounting whizz and a stickler for keeping track of purchases, you’ll find the final cost can easily match a professionally organised wedding with all the bells and whistles.
Think of all the little purchases you’ll make over the months leading up to your wedding. You bought a hundred mason jars for $3 each? That’s great – but the hire fee at your venue was just $1.50 per glass. If you add blackboard paint, burlap, hand-crafted wooden nametags and sprigs of wilting Eucalyptus to each jar, your “budget” option could suddenly cost you hundreds of dollars for just the little things. It’s easy to erode the coffers on small purchases, and if you’re relying on a low-cost wedding, this can make things super stressful. A popular choice is to sell your beautiful decorations on trending Facebook wedding pages and it pays afterwards to keep things a little more professional and classy. Artificial flowers store amazingly well, are hard wearing and travel easily once packed up. They can grace the tables and halls of another bride in a completely different location or state.
3. Want EVERYTHING Cheap
Don’t underestimate the stress of hiring a cheap photographer who delivers terrible photos of your beautiful day. A truly talented photographer can demand high rates for their work. If the price seems too good to be true, it’s probably because the vendor isn’t delivering pictures of a high standard.
We’ve heard many horror stories from couples who have opened their wedding albums only to be shocked and dismayed by the poor-quality images. This isn’t to say that you need to blow your budget on the best photographer money can buy, but keep your expectations in check when it comes to low-cost vendors.
4. Lack Creativity
Let’s face it, creativity doesn’t manifest as “successfully” in all of us. You may have grand designs for your wedding, but pulling that off often takes a lot of skill and hot glue sticks. If you don’t have the former and fear the latter, you may be better off calling in the pros. There’s nothing worse than having a major decoration disaster because you’ve failed to stress-test your handiwork beforehand – a professional will think about style, colour and design to ensure cohesion throughout, particularly where flowers are concerned. The emerging trend of artificial flowers allows you to express your DIY skills with a professional feel. Jars or vases decorated by you can team perfectly with some beautiful floral artificial posies and can be quite inexpensive.
If you’re splashing out on a nice venue and then decorate it with crepe paper streamers and wilting flowers, guests aren’t going to go home with the best impression of your wedding.
If you’re not confident in your abilities, make a list and highlight what you think you’re capable of, and what would be better to buy/outsource.
5. Find it Hard to Relax
Some couples breeze through their DIY wedding with sanity (and love!) intact. If you’re both perfectionists, however, things could get stressful – and fast. It’s totally understandable to covet the wedding of your dreams, but in order to get through this marathon without injury, you both need to set healthy boundaries.
Take breaks from wedding planning, challenge yourselves to pick the first thing you see (not to traipse around twenty different stores looking for the perfect lace), and let things go – often. If you just can’t bring yourself to take a step back when planning gets stressful, then perhaps hiring more vendors or a planner is a better option for you.
6. Have No Backup Plan
You’ve made it to your wedding day with your physical and mental health in one piece. Then it rains. You haven’t ordered a marquee because you had high hopes for sunshine. Your guests are huddled on a veranda waiting expectantly for directions. You’re drawing blanks.
If a wedding planner was here, he or she would leap into action – making decisions and putting into action the back-up plan so all you needed to do was turn up. But if you’re doing it all yourself, that pressure is transferred to you, on the biggest day of your life.
7. Project Manage More Than Enjoying Yourself
This can happen even if you have a planner, fifty vendors, and an army of volunteers, but it’s more of a risk for DIY weddings. If it’s the day of your wedding and you have every second person coming up to you and asking:
- Should I put the dill-infused mascarpone on the wafers before or after the smoked salmon?
- Where are the extra rolls of toilet paper for the guest bathroom?
- Aunt Mary can’t get up the stairs, what should we do?
- Do you know where the groom is?
Then you’re going to get overwhelmed, fast.
If you want to avoid all that, then hire a wedding planner or appoint one of your bridesmaids to the role. She can filter requests, delegate, and only bring things to your attention that you really, really need to know about.
A Final Word of Advice
DIY weddings are magical, personal affairs – and something for you and your betrothed to bond over in the months leading up to your big day. But if it’s becoming more stressful than fun, it might be time to chuck in the blackboard paint, scissors and hot glue gun, and ask the pros for help. The best weddings are the ones where the bride and groom are relaxed and having a wonderful time. If there’s one thing you should “do yourselves”, it’s that!
Breathtaking Flowers Aren't They?
Head over to our Wedding Flowers page to find out more about our beautiful Artificial Wedding Flowers. We can also provide you with an Instant Price Estimate for your upcoming wedding!