Welcome to my first official Wedding Wednesday blog post! I’ve read these posts by other bloggers for years, and I kind of can’t believe that I’m writing one of my own today. You can read all about our magical proposal in this post, if you’re curious. I hope to do one Wedding Wednesday blog post per month, to keep you all updated on our planning process and share any updates. I can’t wait to share more as the details fall into place!
This post has been a long time in the making, so let’s just get right into the good stuff, shall we? It’s been nearly 10 months since we got engaged and I’ll be honest, the planning process is really just getting started for us.
What took so long?
This may seem crazy, but the planning delay happened pretty naturally for a number of reasons. The first being that we got engaged right before the summer started. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve taken full advantage of remote working and have spent the better part of the past two summers down in Florida visiting our families.
Truthfully, we just wanted to enjoy that family time last year, and bask in the feelings of finally being engaged, with no added pressure to rush and plan a wedding. We figured we could enjoy the summer and start planning when we returned to NYC for the fall. So that’s what we did! We’ve been together for nearly 9 years now, so while neither of us particularly wanted a long engagement, we also felt there wasn’t a huge rush to get married either.
Which brings me to the next reason for the delay: we also were not in a place, financially, to throw the kind of wedding we’d want to have. It hit us pretty quickly that weddings are super expensive and we just hadn’t been saving like we should have all these years. So that also played a huge factor in our decision to wait to plan. What’s the point of jumping right in without much savings to work with?
The final nail in the planning coffin came when we found out that we had a to move last fall. That was a huge blow to us, and took up a lot of our extra money, energy, and time that would’ve been used to start wedding planning. Read more about that surprise move in this post. Moving at the beginning of the fall season, and then subsequently traveling a ton for the last few months of the year pretty much took precedent over any real wedding planning for the rest of 2021.
So that brings us to this year! After a whirlwind of a year, we finally felt ready to jump into wedding planning feet-first this year. So what have we been up to?
Picking a Location
Choosing where to have our wedding has actually not been a straightforward process. Most people would just assume that we’d have it here in NYC since we live here. And while that may be true, we felt like there was more to consider than just that. For starters, neither of us are from here—I’m from Philly and Craig is from Maryland. We also realize it isn’t the easiest city for tourists to navigate (driving in the city is a nightmare, expensive hotels, etc.) so asking our friends and families to make the trek up here just felt like a bit of a burden. And surprise surprise, New York is probably one of the most expensive cities to host a wedding in. Fun fact: I got a quote from a potential venue that had a venue fee of $50,000 and I wish that I was joking, lol. So getting married here didn’t necessarily feel like the best option.
Which brought us to the idea of getting married in Florida. The idea of hosting our wedding in Florida makes a lot of sense to us for a number of reasons. Craig’s parents live in the northern part of Florida, and a chunk of my family, including my mom, live in southwest Florida now. It would make the commute to the wedding easier for a lot of people, like my maternal grandma who doesn’t fly. And perhaps the next biggest reason: Craig and I met in Florida!
We’ve talked about this before but we actually met our freshman year at the University of Miami, just over 10 years ago. It feels really special to me, to think that we could get married in the city that brought us together in the first place.
So all that to say, right now, we’ve been exploring wedding options in Miami, Fl!
Picking a Venue
Once we landed on potentially having our wedding in Miami, things immediately were set into motion. While I felt so overwhelmed at the idea of wedding planning last year, I’ve felt the complete opposite this year. It’s been so exciting and fun doing venue and vendor research, building out a Pinterest board and color palette mood boards to paint the picture of our big day. To say, I’ve become a bit obsessed with wedding planning would be an understatement, haha.
Choosing your venue is step number one when you first start to plan a wedding. I’ve mainly been doing my research on The Knot, Here Comes The Guide, Pinterest and Youtube. For any brides-to-be that are reading this and that don’t know where to start, my research process has been to look up venues on The Knot first. It’s a great starting point because you can filter by city and venue type, and they have a lot of info for you to start narrowing down your search. Once I find a venue that I’m intrigued by, I take my search over to the venue’s website & social media where I look for their prices/packages (if they share them publicly), and other information about their space and offerings.
I’m such a visual person, so I also like to see what the space actually looks like at a real wedding. I do a quick Pinterest search of the venue name to see if I can find any photographer’s posts who have shot weddings there. Seeing the professional photos of a real wedding at the venue paints a much more holistic picture of what it could look like on our Big Day. I repeat this search on Youtube, and look for professional wedding videos shot at the venue. Just like seeing it in photos, seeing the space in video-form is also really helpful for me.
After repeating this process for weeks now, we have a list of venues that we’re really interested in. We’ve reached out to them to get their pricing & package information, and keep everything compiled in a digital wedding planner that I may share about in another post in the future.
We also did a few venue tours already, during my birthday trip to Miami last month. Those venues were great, and it was so much fun seeing them in person and envisioning our Big Day there. However, we aren’t sure we saw The One just yet. So we’ve started the research process over, added more venues to our list, and are actually heading back down to Miami at the end of the month to tour some more places! I seriously cannot wait.
We Also Did An Engagement Shoot!
The final update for today’s (very long) post: we did a real engagement photo shoot! Obviously you’ve seen some of the photos throughout this post, but I just couldn’t wait to share them with you guys. It was quite a serendipitous shoot that came together at the last minute during my birthday weekend, and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. We shot with Jessica from @portraitsbyjeroza on Instagram, at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens. If you’ve ever spent time in Miami, you probably know how iconic Vizcaya is. We knew it would be the perfect spot for these photos and of course, it did not disappoint. Jessica was a dream to work with and even was down for our idea to sneak in some champagne to pop at the end of our shoot. The day was absolutely perfect, and I can’t stop staring at these photos.
Since Craig is my blog photographer, we rarely are in nice photos together, beyond the usual selfie on my phone. Having these professional photos that captured us so beautifully has been a dream. I can’t wait to print some and hang them in our apartment!
Okay, this may have been one of my longest posts to date. I’m so excited to continue sharing about our wedding planning process and see it all come together over the next year. If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment below and be sure to follow me on my social channels for more updates in real time! You can find me on Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter.
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