#66: Brave Wedding: Solana & Greg

Today's wedding is not just a string of incredibly vibrant and fun photos (which, by the way, are so great that after viewing them you'll wish you had been invited to the party). This post, brought to you by Team Solana & Greg of Austin, Texas, is chock-full of interesting points to consider. 

Aside from the ever helpful list of money saving tips, this bride brings up the issue of not liking certain aspects of your wedding. And I'm not just talking about, "Oh damn, my bouquet wilted before the start of the ceremony." I'm talking end-of-reception blues, guilt about asking family and friends to help, and wondering if an elopement would have been a better choice. I know, I know...bummer. Who wants to read about such a thing? Well, YOU do. Why? Because not all of us will feel like our wedding day was the most perfect day of our lives, even if we expected it to be. (Case in point: ME! But you'll hear about that another time.) And since a good portion of this blog is about the emotional roller coaster of wedding planning, it's important to consider all kinds of experiences and reactions. This bride is an example of how to find happiness in imperfection, and how to balance regret with heart-warming memories.

And with that, I give you the brave, beautiful, and bold Solana...

I think I am a Brave Bride because well first off, I had a very small budget. When I first started planning I Googled budget weddings and, well, what came up was that a budget wedding was 9,000 to 10,000 dollars. This was twice as much as I had in mind and then some. So needless to say I had my work cut out for me.

I spent months looking for a non-traditional wedding venue that wasn't going to cost my whole budgets worth. I looked into Yoga studios and wellness centers, restaurants, houses for rent, and parks. I didn't find anything that worked for my price and for what I wanted or had envisioned.

Finally I realized that I could have the venue I wanted if I sacrificed the day of week I wanted it on. I decided to save myself about 2500 dollars by having my wedding on a Thursday! It really worked out. It was very scary and, well, we got a lot of flak for it. But I got the dream venue that I wanted for a third of the cost!

Also I did everything else DIY. The flowers we ordered in bulk and arranged ourselves, the decorations candles and chinese lanterns from a wholesale company online, and my husband is a cook and we catered the whole thing ourselves. We had some help of course. We had three good friends come the day of to do all the manual labor (heating the soups and putting out all the food ). But we made all the food the days before. This saved us about 2,000 as well! People looked at us like we had lost our minds when we told them we were doing the catering. But it really worked out great!

I didn't really have a favorite moment it was all my favorite. Although when people started to trickle out I got very sad and realized it was all almost all over . The planning and the anticipation all coming to an end. But then our best man told us he had sprung for a honey moon suite at the Driskill Hotel and well I had that much more to look forward to. (I wasn't ready to go home to our dirty house where we had cooked 15 gallons of soup).

One thing that bugged me about the wedding was that we ran out of booze. We had bought a case of red wine and a case of white wine and two kegs of beer. Well I don't know if we underestimated the drink to person ratio or if our friends are all just raging alcoholics, LOL. In any case, when the booze goes people go looking for more elsewhere as not to end the party. I should have put more money in the alcohol budget because it was a real bummer when I wanted a glass of wine and there was none!

I learned that DIY weddings are really hard and if I could do it again I would either have more money or just eloped. I felt guilty about all the work my family and friends had to put into the whole thing. My mom and her boyfriend's houses were both trashed for days and days after the wedding because all the stuff got taken there after the wedding and it took days to sort through. Who it belonged to, what was rentals, what needed to go where and so on. It has been weeks and we are still sorting things out.

All in all we got tons of compliments on the whole thing. They loved the food the decor. the venue the dress everything. It was hard but it was all so worth it in the end .Our wedding fit us to the "T" just like it should . Fun, laid back, but still pretty and elegant.

Venue: Mercury Hall
Gown: Dolly Couture