Weddings are hard and take up a lot of attention. Some people will fork out 60k and have everything done for them, others can run for much less and do a little bit of the work themselves. Let's focus on doing the latter well.
There are only 2 things that matter:
- Ceremony &/or Reception Venue
- Food, Drink & Music
They need to be close to each other or at the same place, and will decide the date of the wedding. Everything else after that will follow. The reception is typically hardest to figure out.
We strongly suggest that you visit different town and shires around your area or state for beautiful buildings that can be rented out through the council. For very low cost you can get very well maintained, kitted out buildings for nothing.
The only catch is that you need to do everything else yourself.
Requirements of these buildings will be:
- Kitchen
- Table & Chairs
- Rubbish & Access
- Layout (Is there enough space to dine, boogie and supply?)
The rest ends up being details. For example, Macedon Ranges Council has this facility page that you can use to scout out venues. These range in cost, but can be about $400 for 2 entire days of use.
From here you get to build up a bit of a checklist:
- Who is supplying food?
- Grazing Table
- Dinner service
- What is the music situation?
- spotify dj
- live band
- human dj
- Do people have room to move around (both traffic & dancing)
- How many tables, seats and what are the table arrangements? (assigned seating is probably overkill if you have many tables. Long tables you will need them assigned)
- What staff are required to be hired to help setup & service guests?
- What table settings do you want?
- How do people know what tables they are on?
- What type of little wedding favours for guests would you like to provide?
As for table settings, you can book many table settings for your wedding in a vintage mix & match approach on the cheap through vintageeventhire.com who take care of most of the details and reduce the "cost per head" value by a lot.
Lastly you then get into scheduling and sequencing. a 3 or 4 pm ceremony will probably be best to have a 6 or 7 pm reception opening time.
Always remember that people will have a great time if they have plenty of food, drinks and music at big events. Give yourself time to enjoy your special day!
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Disclaimer: We started this company off the back of toiling away for our own wedding and learnt a lot. We were very adamant about not paying the obscene wedding tax on everything. So all of this is opinion and based on our experience planning our wedding while working full time and having a normal social life too.
Say no to the wedding tax!