When to start planning wedding if moving across country in 7 months

You could do either.

You can do a lot of research on venues and suppliers online. Get some ideas of which suppliers you might want to use and where you might want the ceremony. Also, you could start doing some of your DIY stuff now - people make a huge thing about the 'theme' and how you need to know your venue first, but if you have a rough idea of colour/style what you do is pretty much going to fit in anyway - e.g. if you love rustic, you're not going to go for a city-centre posh hotel anyway! We never had a 'theme', we just picked stuff we liked and it's all fitted together!

As for timing, if you are prepared to have a midweek wedding and aren't super picky about your choices, I'd say a few months is plenty to plan. We got engaged at the end of October and are getting married midweek in June with 30 guests - planning is already done and we could easily have planned the wedding to happen now, only we had to wait until June for one of my best friends to be able to fly back from overseas. The only thing that is likely to take a long time is your wedding dress if you are ordering from a boutique - but you could buy that now, or else look at buying a high street/second hand/sale one nearer the time. Depends on how fussed you are about finding 'the one'. I just wanted something comfortable, that looked ok and was within budget - my wedding dress shopping from start to finish took an hour!

Thank you, that's really helpful!

Good to see that you were able to plan it so quickly- a lot of people seem to take ages so I was worried but you made a lot of good points! Best wishes for your wedding!!

Thank you - best wishes to you also.

Planning is really as complicated as you let it/want it to be. If you want the 'perfect' or 'dream' everything, then it's going to take ages, as you'll have to look at dozens of different options for everything (probably several times!) If you're happy with something 'nice' and aren't going to worry that there might be a better option somewhere out there, then you can plan much more quickly.

Our take has been that if we find something that we like (florist, photographer, dress etc), we book it! We don't go on searching in case there is something better out there. Makes planning very easy & quick!