Zen Wedding Planning

Hello, internet land.  I am currently a bride-to-be in the final stages of wedding planning who has managed to stay 98% sane through my wedding planning process (we'll talk about that remaining 2% at a later date).  There are a million wedding planning resources out there, a few of which I've actually found useful for inspiration or ideas (and countless ones that I found rather useless, to put it kindly), but I haven't found anything that gives real advice for real people on how to minimize freakouts and let you live your life while planning a wedding, which is what I aim to do here.



Between my fiance and me, we have two 40+ hour/week jobs, two long commutes, a dog to care for...and, oh yea -- friends and family that we like to see, hobbies we like to enjoy, and plenty other non-wedding related aspects of our life.  We are having an average size, vaguely traditional wedding, and didn't want planning it to become a part time job.  Now that our engagement is 80% over, I've isolated 5 main steps to our wedding planning process that have helped us stay sane while still planning a hopefully rockin' event:

1. Getting in the right mindset - entering the wedding planning process (WPP) with the right expectations

2. Prioritize - understanding what is important for you for your wedding

3. Organize - using the most effective tools to get shit done

4. Splurge - being impractical and indulgent on a few items that are important to you

5. Pace - focusing on a few tasks at once

In the upcoming posts I will explain what each of these things mean, why they were important to us, and how we achieved them.  I would also love to hear about other people's experience keeping their sanity while planning a wedding!

I guess this first post should also come with some caveats.  First, I don't claim to be some amazing wedding planner.  I think our wedding is going to be a sweet ceremony followed by an awesome party, but certainly nothing you would find featured in a style blog or Bridal magazine.  And that's fine with me (I'll expand on this in my next post).  I do claim to be able to plan (along with my fiance) a wedding without going nuts, and without having to drop everything else in your life to do so.

Second, my fiance and I still have a ton of planning to do.  I'm pretty sure we're in the single digits for number of weeks until our wedding, and we are still missing some semi-large pieces of the wedding puzzle.  For example, we don't have flowers.  Or a wedding offiant.  So, actually, it seems like I'm a pretty crummy wedding planner.

You should definitely follow this blog.  You will either get a ton of great advice on planning a wedding, or will be entertained as fiance and I crash and burn in the final weeks leading up to ours, followed by entertaining yet horrifying stories of what happens when you take on the WPP so arrogantly.