Wedding Details

Once all of our vendors were booked from there I then had to move on to what I called the details.  This was all the stuff that scared me because the choices we had were overwhelming.  The menus, programs, guest book, favors, signs (ie guest book, favors, last call), welcome bags and escort cards.  I wanted to make decisions swiftly and keep things simple.  Since we had spent a good chunk of our budget on the venue and food, I was trying to do the rest of tasteful but cheap as possible.  So I turned to Etsy.  

Menu for the whole table

I really do not know what people did before the internet.  I decided to just have one menu per table to keep the clutter (and cost) down, so I ordered that on Etsy with matching table numbers.  My mom suggested wrapping candy in tulle as an easy favor.  I decided to add something personal and had stickers with our names and date made to put on the bottom of the Kisses and top of the Reeses Cups, also from Etsy.  We paid to have our invitations designed by a colleague of my father's and then printed them ourselves.  Since then though I have discovered that there are great invitation templates on Etsy for fairly cheap that can be customized and printed.  You can do all that for less the $1.00 for both the invite and the RSVP.

My wonderful husband to be offered to write the addresses since when he tries his handwriting is better then mine.  And of course we abused the goodwill of our family.  The mother-in-law made the guest book which was a photo book of our engagement pictures plus the programs. 

Guest Book

In August we gathered bridesmaids, aunts, family friends and made them lunch while favors were made and and invitations stuffed and stamped.  It took a couple of hours but if we hadn't taken up on the offers to help, we would've spent days getting all of that done.  One of our last tasks, which just can't be done ahead of time, was the escort cards.  It as probably one of the biggest DIY tasks we undertook for the wedding but we knocked it out in a couple of days.  I ordered tent cards off Amazon and got a template from Etsy.  After the seating chart had been done my husband and I spent a few hours messing with Excel and the printer and eventually got everything printed.  We spent another two hours ripping out and folding the cards in front of the TV. Most of the prices I found were a minimum of $1 a card which would have been an extra $130, instead we did it for about $25 including the template.

DIY Escort Cards

Such a brief overview of our wedding planning.  If I could do it again I would do just a couple of things differently.  I would've kept a separate bank account just for the wedding, it would've helped me track the total cost better.  I also wouldn't have gotten a cake.  I got the cheapest cake I could find, it was butter cream icing and homemade and it was still over $600.  Believe it or not that was at least half of everything else I was quoted.  Looking for a topper stressed me out so I just had the florist bring extra roses and decorate it for me.   The cake looked wonderful and if you are getting one I would recommend going with butter cream icing to keep the costs down.

Our cake

Hindsight though I wish I had saved the money and bought three nice cakes the day before and displayed them on pedestals.  It would've been extra stress right around the wedding but we probably could have saved several hundred dollars.  I also spent too much on the menus and table numbers, for some reason I was overly concerned about them looking nice.  And they did, but I should have just gotten a template made on Etsy and printed them myself again.  I still paid less then what I found to print menus for 130 people though.  Besides that I'm happy with my choices, I think we managed to do quite a few things inexpensively without making it look cheap.

Why the Torpedo Factory?

The Torpedo Factory- November 9th

Wedding planning was every bit as stressful as people say it is, but luckily the day turned out even better then I ever dreamed.  A lot of people asked me how I decided on the Torpedo Factory and really the answer is, I was out of options.  Finding a venue was probably the most challenging task of the whole process.  We spent a month touring venues.  There are a lot of awesome old buildings in DC but most of them have a max of 100 and we were guessing we would have around 150.  Plus we had a lot of out of town guests coming, so we also wanted a place that was near the metro and hotels.  

We quickly learned having it at a hotel was out of our budget.  I scoured the internet looking at local museums and other options.  I almost cried a few days before we toured the Torpedo Factory.  I was starting to think we would either have to hold the wedding someplace we didn't want or that we wouldn't be able to have a fall wedding.  It was less then 10 months out and things were booking quickly.  

The Torpedo Factory isn't an obvious choice at first glance.  During the day it's full of tourists and the lighting is the bright and industrial.  Plus there is a staircase with strange looking art right behind where the ceremony takes place.  Apparently during the rehearsal the night before when it looked like this my dad was extremely concerned about space and how the wedding would turn out.

Torpedo Factory during the day

When I stumbled across pictures online of a wedding there I knew that it was what I wanted.  They only had a few fall dates that were in the range we were looking at so we picked on, wrote a check and never looked back. 

Setup for our ceremony

Dinner for 130