Wedding costs

Hiya Tiffany,

I was the same when I first started looking at things, I had absolutely no idea of what sort of price to expect. Ours roughly should come to around £8000 I reckon, perhaps a bit less. We started out wanting to do it as cheap as possible as neither us blieved in spedning tons of money on a wedding that we could use for our life instead. We then 'upgraded' from some of our original plans which is what ended up costing us a bit more! The main one for us was the venue as we weighed up having a village hall (very cheap where I live - £150 for the whole weekend) but didn't really like the idea of travelling to a ceremony and then to the village hall etc. Our local registry office do the legal wedding bit, at different prices depending on the day and time, you can do it at 10am on a Monday morning for £50 (not including your registration fee etc.) so we thought about having friends perform a ceremony with us and just nipping off to do the legal bit afterwards on the Monday morning. In the end, we found a venue we loved which has accommodation on site for 40 of our guests so, although it cost a lot more than a village hall, we have it from Friday to Monday and can make a whole weekend out of it. Our guests will also pay us something for the rooms so that pays back some of our venue cost. We are having the ceremony on site and are having a later ceremony (3pm). Our friend is making us an amazing cake so after the ceremony we're going to have drinks and cut the cake and do speeches. We're having pie and peas for our wedding food which is costing us £10 per head. Not bothering with favours, centrepieces or floral arrangements - I'm going to buy supermarket flowers for the room and put them in jam jars for the table, paper tablecloths. Decorating the room ourselves with friends, with lots of garlands and paper decorations from ebay etc. We might need a few more tables and chairs and our local council hire them out at £1 per chair and £20 per table so we'll hire from them. Prosecco / cava for toasts rather than champagne. My flowers and bridesmaid flowers - dried flower bouquets from etsy. Not having hair and makeup I don't think, at most may decide to have my hair done. Having bridesmaids but will get high street dresses and for my own dress, i've seen a fifties style one for £60 that I quite like however my friends and Mam are encouraging me to look at more weddingy type dresses...I'm not sure which way I'll go for that, I just don't want to spend a fortune on something to wear only once! We aren't having a photographer, just asking people to take lots of photos and having a friend who is a hobby photographer take a few more special ones. We are hiring video cameras - £350 for 2 cameras, which we'll ask our guests to use throughout the day then the company edits a video for you. One expense I'm happy not to scrimp on is a live band as I think that will add something to everyone's experience, where favours, centrepieces etc. I don't personally ever remember much. We don't need transport as we're all staying there anyway and i bought packets of save the dates and will buy packets of invitations to send out too.

Hope that helps, sorry it's long winded I was writing stuff as it came into my head!

Good luck with your planning!

View quoted message Thank you! Super helpful! We only want something small nothing special. Were thinking 3k for 60 people. We're unsure how realistic this is but I really do want to do everything on a budget.

Hi, we are getting married a year to the day we got engaged (hopefully depending on registrars) and I’m estimating our wedding to come in under £8,000. The majority is on our venue (1920’s Manor House) but we have a great package, 50 day guests and 80 evening, three course wedding breakfast and then bacon and sausage baps on the evening. Local DJ. I’ve got 2 bridesmaids and their dresses are potentially from boohoo, I’m going to wed2be for my dress. My shoes are from jjs house. A recommended local photographer. I’m doing the centre pieces - silver candelabra from eBay and loads of tea lights. Men’s suits will be hired. I’ve ordered silk flowers for me, bridesmaids, button holes and corsages as well as registrar table arrangement which will transfer to the top table. Invites are a hybrid of bought inserts and handmade outer with wax seals (which I’m doing myself). I’m not bothering with save the dates. Our cake will be a small white sponge with some form of decoration and then a ton of Krispy Kreme donuts. Favours - if we do them are going to be seed infused paper you plant


There’s probably more I’ve forgotten but I think that’s not bad considering we only got engaged 3 weeks ago

View quoted message

I think you definitely could doing it the village hall way and having people pitch in, and going to the registry office or church instead of having someone to come out to you (that was a lot more expensive than we had anticipated!). We looked at one near Kirby Lonsdale that was £150 for the weekend, it had a big room, outside area, cloakroom, separate bar area and full kitchen. They had a sound system you could link in to and it included all the tables and chairs and plates, glasses etc. It just would have been a case of decorating it on the Friday and cleaning it on the sunday with people to help out but sometimes it would be worth asking if you could pay extra for some of the hall volunteers to help out as some of the halls I looked at offered this. I'm going to look on ebay after the wedding season to see if I could pick up a job lot of room decorations that someone doesn't need anymore, stuff like that. Anyway good luck again and enjoy your planning!

View quoted message

"Our cake will be a small white sponge with some form of decoration and then a ton of Krispy Kreme donuts."

A couple years ago I shot a wedding and they had a doughnut wall, I had never came across one before and thought it would be "the next big thing to have" but I have never seen one since. here it is.

3k is definitely doable. Ours is 5k and that’s everything from venue, registrar, attire, to favours and little bits.
We needed up going for the more expensive suits, dress, make up artist and florist which took us closer to 5k but we said originally 4K.
Have a look at cheaper days (not Saturdays etc) and venues like a community hall and a registry office. Or places that do packages