lexi, Procurement Professional & travis,Tax Consultant
Sum-up of the wedding vibe: Nothing fancy just love… and dogs.
Planned budget: $10,000
Actual budget: $14,000
Number of guests: 13
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
Where we allocated the most funds:
The bulk of the budget went to our event services vendor for the flowers, decor, bartender and servers, DJ, day-of coordinator, rentals, and catering.
Where we allocated the least funds:
The most important thing to us was that our dogs played a starring role in our big day, and we didn’t want to be restricted in any way from the venue around the dogs. Travis’s close family friend (who we call Uncle Rick) and his wife were kind enough to let us have the wedding at their beautiful house in the Austin Hills. Uncle Rick also got ordained and performed the ceremony, which ended up being both heartfelt and hilarious.
Travis wore a suit that he already owned. About ten minutes after we got engaged I asked him if he could wear his blue suit to the wedding.
What was totally worth it:
Every penny that we spent with our vendors!
What was totally not worth it:
Absolutely nothing. When you follow your compass and set boundaries for yourself up front you can’t go wrong!
Favorite thing about the wedding:
Every aspect of our wedding was personalized but our favorite part was our vows, which we wrote ourselves. We collaborated on how we would start and end but filled in the middle individually and didn’t reveal the middle to each other ahead of time.
A few things that helped us along the way:
Our vendors! You are hiring and paying these professionals for their expertise so utilize them for all the advice. Our photographer Diana helped us plan our wedding day timeline and kept things moving on the day of the wedding. Larry from Sterling Events set us straight on needing a DJ and day-of coordinator (which we didn’t think we needed, but we did). I had my heart set on a three-tiered wedding cake, which was unnecessary for a thirteen-person wedding. Our baker suggesting doing a smaller statured cake, with a faux tier at the bottom. Not only did this make the cake more practical, but it also saved us hundreds of dollars!
The APW website also proved a helpful resource from start to finish in all aspects!
My best practical advice for my planning self:
Be flexible! When we got engaged I declared to my parents, “I’m not wearing a white dress!” and swore off wearing a veil. This all changed as I started looking into wedding ideas, researching vendors, and shopping for dresses. I realized that veils made for super awesome, dramatic photos. I bought a hundred dollar, nine-foot (all the drama) veil and wore it for ten minutes worth of photos that ended up being some of our favorites! As I tried on dresses, the non-traditional looks just didn’t make me feel like a bride. I’m glad I wasn’t stubborn and went with what felt right for me.
Things will go wrong, but everything will be okay. I laughed over wedding faux pas stories one afternoon with a coworker who was talking me down from a meltdown after I saw that it was likely to rain on our wedding day. She made me realize that it is the things that go wrong that are going to make perfectly unique stories that you will tell for years to come.
Something Else We’d Like to Share:
We both really love photos, so getting the right photographer was the most important thing to us. The wedding date and time were dictated by Diana’s availability and advice for getting the best photos. This lead us to getting married on Cinco de Mayo. While we didn’t want a theme wedding, we did serve fajitas at dinner as a wink to the holiday.
Eight weeks passed from the day we got engaged to the day we got married. After we got engaged I asked Travis when he thought we should get married and he asked, when can we get married?! The short timeline meant that I could only buy a sample or sale dress that I could take home that day. Even for those who have a longer timeline, check out the sample dresses! You would be amazed at the deals you can get. The dress that I ended up buying would have been out of budget at the original price.
We have six rescue dogs, and the owners of the house have four rescue dogs. So, there were ten dogs in attendance on our wedding day. The neighbor’s dog also made an appearance at one point!
Why all the dogs? We each had two dogs coming into the relationship and have adopted two together.
