Helpful Hints for Planning a Fall Wedding

You’re engaged, now what? Navigating the wedding planning process can be confusing. Here are three tips that helped me get started planning my fall wedding.

Getting engaged was a fantastic time in my life. It was VERY unexpected (see this post for our engagement story), but I was so thrilled to start the wedding planning process. Eihab and I got engaged at the end of December, 2014, and decided to get married in September 2015 (check out this post for tips on choosing a date and venue for your wedding!).

3 Tips for Planning a Fall Wedding

I immediately went out and bought ‘The Wedding Planner and Organizer’ book by Mindy Weiss. I used it a lot for the first 4-5 months of my planning. It was extremely useful for helping me to remember small important details to ask vendors. It reminded me to ask the potential venues about things like electricity – how are we going to plug in our special lighting, where are the electrical plugs for the band to set up and play from, etc. Basically it was helpful for important details that you wouldn’t necessarily think of yourself when looking at a venue. After I had booked most of my vendors and was down to planning the reception and ceremony events and decorations, I didn’t find it quite as useful and I eventually stopped using the book altogether.

Another resource I found useful was The Knot’s Wedding Planning Website. They also have a mobile app, which was super handy. I found The Knot to be much more useful for big picture – mainly because you can search venues and vendors, pin pictures, create your own Wedding Website (for free!), and track your budget all in one place. I personally found it much more helpful than using a planning book at the end of the process.

The last thing I found useful was attending Wedding Shows around Portland. We knew we wanted to get married in Portland, so I Google searched for wedding shows in the area. I went to one in Salem, which is about a 45 minute drive from Portland. This wasn’t very helpful and I don’t recommend going to a wedding show outside the city you are getting married in. It had a lot of vendors that were specific to that area, so there wasn’t a lot for me personally. Also, wedding shows can be very overwhelming! I recently went to one at the Oregon Convention Center and there were so many people and vendors. It really can turn into information overload. I would advise waiting to attend these shows if your wedding is more than a year away.