Backstage | The Williford Wedding

All the Things You Don’t Budget For

Weddings take a lot of stuff. Just ask my dining room. With three days to go, boxes and bags of wedding gear have taken over the place where we have candlelit dinner every night …room we don’t really use anyway.

And the thing is, we didn’t budget for any of this stuff. I mean, there were generic line items in our budget for things like “decor” and “attire,” but I never put much thought into the specifics of what we’d need to buy up in the weeks leading to the wedding. I just wrote $500 next to decor. It seemed like enough.

Spoiler alert: It was not enough. Here are some of the things that we’ve recently shelled out for to complete our wedding day:

Jamali Garden

• 24 white ceramic cube vases, $72
• 24 tall mason jars, $19
• One roll of 12″ kraft paper, $19
• 12 beer growlers, $39
• 36 beer bottles, free (thank God)
• 48 votive candles, $26
• 20 tall prayer candles, $20 (minus Jesus and Mary, plus custom printed vellum wraps)
• Flowers and plants, $447
• A big chalkboard, $12
• A little chalkboard, $7 (plus $20 shipping, what a racket!)
• A medium-sized chalkboard, $15
• Vinyl decals to stick on the chalkboards, $188 (money well spent, as far as I’m concerned, since I don’t have to actually draw anything)
• A few extra vinyl decals to fix some spelling mistakes we should have caught in the first place, $20 (whoops!)

Grand total for decor: $904

Only around $400 over budget. Whoops again!

The flowers, specifically, were way more than I expected, considering we’re DIY’ing all the florals for the wedding (I don’t buy flowers often, can you tell?). But I am so terribly excited to put it all together. So know this: Yes, your wedding budget is a scary number. But it will go up. It always does. Keep your head on straight and make sure every cent is well-spent to make you happy.

What last-minute expenses popped up for your big day?

08. October 2014 by Taryn
Categories: Budget, DIY, Flowers & Decor | Leave a comment