Planning our Wedding

Hey guys!

So I wanted to talk a little bit about our wedding planning experience so far! I will definitely be doing a lot more posts on this topic now that we have a venue and a date picked but I wanted to talk about everything that happened up until we got to that point. 

In the beginning, we were both kind of leaning towards eloping or I should say just a very small wedding ceremony with my parents, his parents, and our siblings. We weren't going to invite anyone else or probably even tell anyone else until after we had gotten married but I have wanted a wedding my entire life. It wasn't until I got older and started dating my fiancé that I started to lean more towards eloping. The main reason for that is money! Weddings cost a lot of money! I seriously can't believe how much our wedding is costing both of our parents and our friends and family. It's basically the price of a decent car or two cheap ones! I feel guilty and absolutely so grateful and blessed that our parents are willing to help us out! It seriously means the world to us! 

Anyways, I have always wanted a December wedding, like my heart has always been dead set on this and well, I am not having a December wedding. We are actually getting in married in March mostly because a December wedding wasn't really going to workout for us so we had pick a new month! This was honestly kind of a struggle. We have a lot of people getting married around the same time as us and for two of the weddings we knew when they were, we already had the save the dates and we knew not to have a wedding around the same time as theirs which is another reason why a December wedding just wasn't going to work for us. Also, we didn't start planning our wedding until April of this which pretty much means that every venue had already been booked for December of this year and I just didn't really want to have a two year long engagement and get married December of 2023. Although thinking about it now, time is going by so fast that it might have not even felt like a two year long engagement. 

We started looking for venues back home in Lee County, FL and pretty much every venue was already booked for March of 2023 except for Friday or Sunday weddings and we both knew that we only wanted a Saturday wedding. We don't think that there is anything wrong with getting married on either a Friday or Sunday, we both just had a Saturday preference. So then we started looking for other places and our next location was Jekyll Island in Georgia. My family enjoys vacationing here every few years and the Jekyll Island Club is just absolutely beautiful and historic and we thought it would be a great place to get married and have a fun destination wedding! Well we got pretty far into the details only to find out the venue we had selected required you to rent out the entire cottage for the entire weekend and the room rates averaged about $600 a night which we would be charging to our guests. We felt that we could not do that to our guests considering how much the wedding was already going to cost and the fact that some people would have to fly in and possibly get rentals cars on top of everything else.

So then we were back on the hunt! We then moved our search to Tampa/Orlando. I probably reached out to at least 20 different wedding venues that were either already booked or again only had availability on Friday or Sunday. Some of them were also houses where we had to rent out the whole thing for the entire weekend which seemed so crazy to me! And they didn't even have enough rooms to host every person attending the wedding.

The wedding venue that we finally decided to go with was one that we had talked about before but it was more of a haha kind of suggestion. Not a serious one! But when we pretty much ran out of ideas, I reached out to them and found out what their availability was and thankfully they had a date in March at our top picks for ceremony venue and reception venue so we said yes! The wedding venue we went with was Disney! We are getting married at their Wedding Pavilion at the Grand Floridian Resort and then our reception will be held in one of their ballrooms at the Grand Floridian. Our Wedding will be on March 4th, 2023 and we could not be more excited! We have a guest list of over 100 people and even though the average show rate for most weddings is only 80% we have a feeling that ours will be higher due to the fact that most of our family members are avid Disney fans! They have been going to the parks for many, many years and they were all very excited when we told them that we would be getting married there!

I plan to do many more posts on the wedding as I am very excited and I can't wait to document everything for us to look back on someday and to share our Disney wedding experience with everyone! I also plan to discuss bachelor and bachelorette parties as well my bridal shower! I will be discussing gifts that I plan on buying for our wedding party and family as well our registry!

Thank you so much for stopping! I hope you enjoyed todays post and I hope that you continue to come back for the rest of our Disney wedding adventure! 

XO, Steph