Engaged, What Next?

Congratulations! Getting engaged is was one of the happiest days of my life and I hope yours was too. Getting engaged can sometimes become quite overwhelming as planning a wedding can be very confusing on where to start and what to do. Hopefully this blog post will make you feel a bit more at ease about the exciting journey of wedding planning ahead.

Announce your engagement! 

After getting engaged you obviously need to tell your friends and family, try and do it face to face as this way you can see their reaction. Once you have told your friends and family you can then put it on social media if you wish. I told most of my family over the phone as they all live quite far from me and I wanted to be the one telling them instead of them finding out from another family member.

Celebrate!

Some couples decide to have and engagement party to celebrate their engagement. My Fiancé and I did it a different way as his family all live in Portugal, so we celebrated with my family in England and then flew out to Portugal to celebrate with his. It nice to do something to celebrate your engagement as this way you can have you family and friends involved with the celebrations.

Make sure you ring is insured

Engagement rings do not come cheap so one of the first things I did after getting engaged was to make sure it was insured on our home contents insurance. It will give you peace of mind in case something does happen. One thing to keep in mind is to read their terms and conditions as some of them are strict on what circumstances your ring is insuranced under.

Starting thinking about what sort of wedding you want 

This is a really exciting part of engagement, starting to thing about what sort of wedding you want. Before engagement I already had an idea of what wedding I would like, but remember that it’s a special day for both of you so compromise is needed. This is the time when you need to discuss if you want to get married at home or abroad, when you want to get married and if you want a religious ceremony or a civil ceremony.

Great wedding inspiration 

There are so many way of getting inspiration for your wedding; magazines, websites, wedding fares. My favourite website for inspiration is Pintrest, there are so many images for every aspect of your wedding and it really helped me. I found great different boards for dresses, invites, themes, venues and it helped us and my parents get an idea of what we wanted for our wedding. There are also a lot of different wedding magazines, my favourite is Brides. If you want to see some of the boards and pins I made have a look at my Pintrest here, you may even spend hours on it!

Budget

A budget is essential as a wedding is a very costly event, which I never quite understood untill I started looking at venues. You budget will all depend on what you want and can afford, just remember its one day, you will want it to be perfect, but don’t spend you life savings! There is a lot to consider for your budget, size of wedding party, number of guests, venue, transport, flowers etc. If you roughly budget for each element of the wedding you then know what you can and can’t afford.

Wedding Venue

This is one of the biggest decisions you will make and I found its also one of the most exciting. Its good to have an idea of what type of venue you want; barn, hotel, castle, country house. There are so many to choose from that you need to have an idea before looking. My advise is to have a look around a few different venues before making your mind up, on paper one venue might look great but once you go around it in person you can then get a feel for the place and also the staff working there. I also had a list of question that I asked each venue so I could see how they compared to one another and this is one of the facts which helped us choose our venue.

Another piece of advice is if you are planning on getting married in the summer or around popular times of the year, you need to book your venue far in advance. We booked our venue almost 2 years in advance and 2 Saturday’s in the month we wanted had already been booked. Some venues will let you reserve a date for a week or so to give you some time to decided and my advice is if you like the venue, take this opportunity. It seems a bit rushed to reserve it but say you come back to book it, and hadn’t reserved it, that special date you wanted could be gone.

The venue will also determine you budget in someways, but you wedding will be based around the venue so you can afford to spend a bit on it.

Wedding Party 

After choosing the wedding venue its a good idea to start thinking about your wedding party as it allows the best man and maid of honour to be included in the wedding planning and they can then help you out. Once you have an idea of who you want to ask you can then decided how you want to ask them. I choose to give my maid of honour and bridesmaids a box of beauty and pampering product with a little note. It completely up to you at the end of the day

So let the planning commence, if you aren’t engaged this may be an eye opener, and trust me you will find your man! If you are getting married soon, they keep an eye out for wedding related blog posts every monday. I will be going into more detail of all the sections above and many more. Where would you like to get married? Comment bellow, and as always see you Wednesday.

Steph x