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Hi Sue our plan of action for our wedding was:


1. Work out a guest list for day and evening. This could also be when you think about bridesmaids and groomsman. Remember the more you have, typically the more expensive it could get as most of the time you will buy their outfits for them or make a contribution towards them. 2. Work out the max budget (things always end up being more expensive than you think, so maybe take your max budget and knock it down 20% so you have a buffer. 3. Determine what sort of wedding you want. I.e. church wedding of registry office then reception at a hotel, village hall, barn. Or do you want a wedding ceremony and reception at the same location? Also work out what you want for food and drink. Sit down meal, buffet etc? 4. Research what location you want to get married. Maybe it is close to where you currently live or somewhere with meaning to you both? Where you got engaged, a home town etc. 5. Start emailing and calling venues that fit your guest list numbers. We found venues had a different number of people for a ceremony versus the evening. This is to do with their marriage license and dictates the amount of people that can be at the ceremony. Make a list of who you have contacted, their max capacity and cost up a rough estimate of how much the wedding would be with your guests and any additional extras such as upgrades you may want. Then once you have researched you will have a better understanding of what is available and in your price range and then go look at the venue and hopefully book one in.
Hope this helps, there are more steps after this such as outfits, rings, invites, colour schemes, table plans etc but this is where we started.

These were my steps at beginning:

1. Budget - how much we had already and could realistically save between then and the wedding.

2. Rough guest list - any venue you contact will ask for a rough idea of numbers. We broke ours into “essential” (people we absolutely can’t get married without), “desired” (the ones we expect we’ll invite) and “if there’s room and it doesn’t up the cost too much”.

3. Research venues. I predominantly used Hitched for this. I didn’t have a clear idea of exactly what kind of venue I wanted (our dream venue was way out of our budget, so after that was ruled out it felt a bit like being lost in a sea of endless options!), so I searched through, looked for ones that fell into our budget, preferred area and number of guests. Not all had this information readily available so I sent out a lot of enquiries.

4. Narrowed down venues to a shortlist of 4-5, and arranged viewings. FH and I had a week off work together and booked them all in that same week.

5. Provisionally reserved our date with the venue we liked the most (most will hold your date for a few days) and made sure the registrar had availability that day, and then confirmed the venue and registrar.

Once you have your venue, everything else starts to take a lot more shape, so I think it’s really important to get that sorted as early in the process as you can. Your venue can define things like whether you can have the ceremony and reception in the same place or if you need to have the legal ceremony somewhere else (as only some venues are licensed for ceremonies). It’ll also help you narrow down food options, styling, colour schemes, guest numbers etc.

Try to enjoy the process as much as you can - this is the fun bit where you can dream and imagine all the different things your wedding could look like!

View quoted message Thank u so mush

View quoted message Thank u so much

Another way of finding venues is looking on the council's website of where you want to get married. They should have a list of everywhere that has a licence to host ceremonies. You may find more venues than those who pay to advertise on Hitched or be the top search results on Google.

View quoted message Thank u I will have a look

Definitely look around venues, we had 6 that we visited and had to chose from one of those what we went for

View quoted message I have started to look but I can’t not find anywhere that I like

View quoted message Hmmm where are you based x

View quoted message I’m based in Salisbury

View quoted message Oh okay xx hmmm have you looked on here for venues xx that’s how I found mine x

View quoted message Not yet but I will have a look xx

View quoted message Yeah definitely have a look xx it helped me out a lot x

View quoted message Ok thank u

View quoted message No worries x

Budget and venue!

View quoted message Thank u Sarah