How We Got Married, Part II

When we got married, I was seriously considering inviting just our immediate family to my mom's backyard because I had no idea how we were going to afford an actual wedding. You may remember my mentioning in the previous post that Adam didn't have any work and that, in fact, he was still in school when we got engaged. I had some money stashed away, but only enough to get married in, well, our backyard.

I mentioned the backyard idea to some family members, and while I'm sure "outraged" is too strong a word, they were upset and offended, and they started contributing monetarily to our effort.

$3,500 later, I actually had some money to get married! Armed with what I believed to be a tremendous amount of money, I began doing research on my wedding.

My first reality check came when I was researching dresses. I noticed very quickly that most of the dresses that I liked were about half of my entire budget. My second reality check came when I realized that churches cost a lot of money, too. The first church I inquired about was $1,500 dollars to rent. And that was a church where I had connections! Most of the other local churches had similar price tags (I'm sure I'll have a post about just this topic one day, but not today.). I gulped. All I could afford was a dress and a church. I went to www.theknot.com (where every bride should go, at least to get oriented) and tried out their budget calculator to see what I should realistically think of spending on everything for the amount I had. They gave me an itemized list of what I should buy and what percent of my budget it should be. On my budget, I had $10 to spend on our wedding rings. "Uh, that's not going to work."Afraid that I would have to tell my guests to bring their own food, I decided I would have to be extremely creative and, dare I say, unconventional about the whole thing.

I learned that calling something "Wedding XYZ," or "Bridal ..." makes it at least three times more expensive. I decided to look for just a "white dress" and see what I found. I went to a vintage boutique and found a whole line of remakes of vintage dresses from the 1920's. My wedding dress cost only $200. After I bought the dress, I had a (short-lived) sense of well-being that this was really the most important part and now everything else would fall into place. The spell lasted for several weeks, and I do believe that might have been part of the reason why I didn't get anything else done for so long.

I was at my wit's end with the church. I had looked everywhere and could not find anything in my budget. Then, 6 weeks before the wedding, I remembered a very old church that had become a historical building. I had taken a class in it, and I knew that it had been remodeled the summer before. I got in touch with the director of the church's preservation committee and asked him if they rented it for weddings. Yes, they did, for $500 ( - at the time. They have since raised the price because they realized what they had and that it was WAY too sweet of a deal.). The church had a lovely wood interior, a round sanctuary with a balcony, gorgeous stained glass, and huge brass organ pipes just over the stage. It was breathtakingly gorgeous, and they had a pretty hall right next to the sanctuary for a reception. There was no kitchen, but there was a sink and a refrigerator in the back, and we could live with it. I booked it on the spot.

Now that I had a church, a dress, a date, a groom, and I still had money left (miracle!), I was finally ready to invite people and a wedding party and get the ball rolling.

Invitations are ridiculously expensive. Especially "Wedding" invitations. I could get a box of 20 for $25. I could get really crappy ones for less, but then I would have really crappy wedding invitations. I decided to test my creativity and make some myself. 100 sheets of card stock, 50 sheets of vellum paper, and 70 feet of ribbon later, I had the fixings to make 100 invitations. Since it was the first week of classes, business was pretty slow at the writing center, so I had an assembly line of helpful fellow writing tutors punching holes and tying ribbons while I worried obsessively that I had a typo on the invitations and that one of them would spot it (I didn't; they didn't). I spent $25 on 100 invitations.

After my bridesmaids agreed to be in the wedding, I gave them the good news: I wasn't making them buy an expensive dress. Based on the weddings I had been in, not only are bridesmaid dresses expensive, but you have to buy them many, many weeks in advance. We didn't have many, many weeks. We were almost down to counting in days. I worried that it might be morbid, but I told them that they were to wear black dresses. If they already owned one, they could just wear it. I had stipulations on length and shininess, but otherwise they were free to do what they wanted. They each already owned a black dress that fit my criteria, and they were really good sports about coordinating with each other so that they really did match. I think I made them wear silver shoes, so they may have had to buy shoes, but it was better than the $150 they could have spent on a dress! The boys were in black suits, so everyone matched.

My mother-in-law bought the flowers in bulk from Sam's. She did all the arrangements herself, and they were gorgeous. She also bought 300 feet of something called drain field sewage fabric. It looks exactly like gossamer, but it's $.07 a foot at Home Depot. We didn't tell our guests; they didn't notice.

My own mother was in charge of food. I wrote her a check for $300 and said, "Go crazy." She looked at the $300 and said, "Uh. How many guests are coming?"

"About 100."

"You do know that this is really not a lot of money, right?"

"We can order pizza if we need to."

"Honey, we can't run out of food."

"It'll be ok. Everything will work. It has to. It has to!"

And then I think I started crying.

When I recovered, Mom decided to make a lot of the food herself and make my budget work. She ordered sandwiches from the grocery store, made the world's largest cheese log, made cheese puffs of some variety, and bought fresh strawberries right out of the field to garnish the table. She ordered white table cloths and an overlay with black and white floral designs.

The end result, starring my grandmother's beautiful

silver platters and my mother's beautiful silver candelabras

Wedding cakes are another outrageously expensive item. Some people really like cake, and some people are really great at making beautiful cakes, and those people should be duly compensated. I don't really like cake, so the idea of spending $500 on a cake (the going rate) was horrifying to me. We decided to buy plain white cupcakes at Sam's club at $15 for 30 of them. Then, my mother-in-law decorated them with fresh flowers on a 3-tier platter. It looked like this:

There were way more than these, but they are elsewhere

on the table. There was an explosion of cupcakes

just to the left of this shot.

Adam's mom bought a whole bunch of little picture frames from a dollar store and spread them around the room on the tables. We had little boxes with Red hots (the candy) in them with a little "Thank you" message for favors. 

The wedding was beautiful and fabulous, and I have estimated that the final price tag, including our honeymoon and all the little things (and big things) our families bought and did for us was in the neighborhood of $5,000. And I thought I would have to get married in the back yard...

I am sure I will have many more happy days, but so far that was the happiest of my life.

Because I love GK Chesterton so much, here's another quote by him:

"Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else."