Good Morning Romancers! We’ve made it to hump day [or as we like to call it, DIY Wednesday] and we’ve got something fairly awesome to share! I decided to reuse the talk on DIY Weddings I put together and delivered at Borrowed Event by breaking it out into a 5-part series on the blog!

We got some really great feedback from the talk at the show ~ and I did spend a good amount of time and energy on my talk and subsequent PowerPoint slides, so I figured why not get a little more bang for my buck AND get to share the advice with more than just the attendees at Borrowed that listened to me speak.

So for today, I will open with WHY you should have a DIY Wedding. And the next five DIY Wednesdays will explain HOW you can have one!

Why you should have a DIY Wedding:

One of the main things that allowed Andy & I to create our perfect, unique & offbeat DC wedding was DIY [aka “Doing It Yourself”].

If a wedding is the joining of two individuals, and no two individuals are the same ~ then I wonder how any two weddings can be the same.  In my opinion, they shouldn’t be – a wedding is the union of two individuals, two personalities, families and traditions – any combination of all these things between two people should & could never yield the same results.

DIY weddings allow for a personal, unique wedding

One way to accomplish a unique wedding is to have DIY in your wedding. A DIY wedding allows you to create a wedding that is truly your own [because YOU made it!].

Doing things yourself and making your own wedding elements allows your wedding to be a true reflection of who you are as individuals and who you are as a couple.

This is who Andy & I are as a couple … animated, slightly chaotic, full of life & color, and ALWAYS having fun, surrounded by the people in our lives that we love:

DIY weddings keep your family, friends & partner involved in the planning process

Everyone has heard the saying that your wedding day flies by in an instant – I’d say they’re wrong – it flies by even faster than that. But one of the benefits of making things for your wedding is that it keeps you involved in the entire planning process and allows you to experience and enjoy more of what your wedding really is about.

Almost every part of mine & Andy’s wedding was made by us or someone we loved and it made the wedding an absolute labor of love, absolutely unique and 100% us.

DIY weddings elicit a deeper appreciation

DIY brings out a greater appreciation in your wedding both for you, and your guests.

When someone complimented one of our DIY projects, it made us feel extra special that is was something we made, not just something we paid for. And when people found out all the things we made, it gave them a deeper appreciation for the wedding and all of the elements in it that took so much time to put together.

We couldn’t believe how many of our guests took home the Christmas ornament favor we made for them AND many of them still send me pictures each year of the ornament on their trees at Christmas time :)

DIY weddings can save you money!

Finally, one of the biggest reasons people use DIY in a wedding is for the cost benefits. DIYing your wedding can give you some serious savings when it comes to the cost of weddings AND give you some extra room in your budget for the things you can’t DIY.

Example: On average in the Washington, DC area, couples spend around $1k for wedding invitations. We DIYed ours and with postage, it only cost us $450 for 150 invitations.

Another Example: On average in the Washington, DC area, couples spend around $2,300 for florals & decor. We DIYed ours [no flowers!] and only spent around $400!

Even programs alone can run you around $100 … but we decided to forgo the traditional program, save some trees & some money, and just print two posters out of our “program details” instead:

Now that I told you the WHY …. over the next 5 weeks I will tell you HOW to have a DIY Wedding with my 5 main points! Hope to see you back here next week :)

 

6 comments

  1. I love tossing etiquette out the window and making a wedding your own! I designed our invites and I couldn’t be happier with them! I feel they really reflect the vibe I want for our wedding: classy but not stuffy, a mesh of old meets new. Can’t wait to see the rest of the series :)

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