Photo by Madeline Paige Photography

At long last, I’m finally back to share another Wedding Wednesday update! It’s been a little over six months since my last wedding update and I have lots to share with you guys, including our official wedding date, the wedding vendors we’ve booked so far, and much more. Let’s just jump right into it.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was actually written back in August so naturally, we have more updates to share and some of these to-do’s are now crossed off our list. I promise, the next Wedding Wednesday post will not take months to come. Get ready for much more regular wedding content, since we’re finally under a year away!

We Officially Have a Wedding Date!

In my last Wedding Wednesday post, we were right in the thick of our venue search and flying down to Miami every other month to find the perfect fit. Well friends, after touring nearly 10 different venues all over South Florida, I’m so excited to share that we finally have our wedding venue! We booked it right after seeing it during our last trip to Miami, back in April, which means we also finally have a wedding date! For those who don’t know, your venue sometimes ends up dictating your date based on their availability. Of course, if you really have your hearts set on a specific date, you could get lucky and choose a venue with that specific day available; Craig and I only felt strongly about the season (fall), so we were pretty flexible and open to most dates next fall.

All that to say, we are officially getting married in Miami on November 10th of next year! That feels incredible to say and we are both so excited for the Big Day. Since we’re getting married in a city where neither us, or most of our guests live, we’ve decided to lean into the “destination wedding” vibe and make a weekend out of it. More to come on that later…

Other Important Wedding Vendors We’ve Booked

Once we officially booked our venue and date, we knew it was time to get moving on securing key wedding vendors for our date. After C*VID upended the wedding industry in 2020 and pushed out so many couples’ weddings, it’s been crazy finding and booking vendors for your date. Everyone is super busy and some are even booked out over a year in advance. With 1.5 years until our wedding, we knew we had to get moving.

We ended up going with a venue that covers a lot of things in our package, like food, bar, tables & chairs, etc. Since we’re planning all the way from NYC, it gave us a lot of peace of mind to know that all of these big things were already handled and taken care of by our venue. Less for us to worry about is never a bad thing.

So with that in mind, we started our search for photographers and videographers first. Craig and I both agree that we want our day to be captured on photo and video, so we’ll have all the memories to look back on for years to come. We actually found Craig’s parents’ wedding tape recently and watched it with his sisters; it was really special seeing them tie the knot over 20 years ago and seeing relatives that have since passed. So it’s really important to us to have the same thing for our future children (and us, of course).

We ended up finding and booking our photographer back in May, and our videography team in July! Both actually are not from Miami, funny enough, but they both have such beautiful work and really connected with us during our discovery calls so we felt good about booking them. They were also within, or willing to work with our budget, which was obviously very important too.

The next vendor we booked, as of last weekend, was our partial wedding planner! This one I’m super excited about because we weren’t sure we’d be able to make it happen for a while. We knew that we definitely needed a day-of coordinator, but I personally wanted to find someone that could come in and join our planning process much earlier so they really got to know us and our vision; someone that could help us find the rest of our vendors and really put their professional touch on it and bring everything together. We have our creative vision of course, but you simply can’t beat a professional, if you ask me.

This one was tough because, honestly, we were getting a lot of really high quotes. I’m talking nearly $10,000, which we simply cannot afford. When we finally landed on our planner, Indiana, things finally felt right. We’re so excited to bring her into the fold, and see how she helps us along the rest of our planning process.

What’s Next on Our To-Do List?

Now that we have a lot of the big things taken care of, our wedding has really started to take shape. Our next big tasks are to finalize the rest of our super important wedding vendors like our florist and DJ. We also really need to nail down our wedding party proposals and get those sent out. Since most of our bridesmaids and groomsmen live in other states, we’re trying to figure out a cute “proposal” for them that will also survive shipping, haha.

We also have our next Miami trip set for this November. I’m so excited to head back down and take care of a number of wedding things. First, we have an engagement shoot with our wedding photographer all set; it’s going to be SO GOOD, you guys. I can’t wait to share the photos later this year. These photos will be used for our Save the Dates and wedding website as well. Of course, we still love the photos from our serendipitous engagement shoot back in February, but our wedding photography package included a complimentary engagement shoot, so we figured we should go all out for them.

Also during our November trip, I’m hoping to set up a venue walkthrough with our planner, to talk through our vision and figure out layouts for the various spaces. We haven’t seen it since our very first tour, so I can’t wait to see it again in person! Finally, I want to set up an appointment with an event furniture rental company to get all of our rentals booked.

So it’s a big trip ahead of us, but I can’t wait! Lots of things are in the works now and I’m just really excited to keep seeing it come together and ultimately get closer to our wedding day.

I hope you enjoyed today’s Wedding Wednesday post! I’m so excited to continue sharing 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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