Wednesday 9 January 2013

I'm not talking about weddings...but how do you plan one?

So when I started this blog a couple of months back, I mentioned I am engaged and have a wedding to plan, but that this blog is NOT going to become a place for me to talk all about weddings. I have followed other blogs that became too "wedding-ee" and it gets very boring very fast. So as promised, I am going to keep any wedding-talk to a very bare minimum. I just want to know, from anyone out there with experience...how do you plan a wedding? Where and when do you start? And how do you go about planning a wedding that is to be held in another country (Ireland to be specific)?!

The plan is to get married this year, in the autumn...have I left the planning too late? I have the tendency of getting over excited/overwhelmed and either making plans far too soon, or leaving things way too late. A wedding is pretty major, so I don't want to screw anything up, throw money down on something too soon and then change my mind. And since we are talking planning an event in Ireland (and home base is Canada) what if something happened and we had to cancel or couldn't travel...remember that volcano in Iceland...REMEMBER?!?!?!

So now it is 2013...in just over a months time it will mark 1 year since our engagement and we have pretty well told everyone we know that the wedding IS happening this year...I actually need to get started! I have emailed a few potential venues that I had my eye on, but the more I look, the more I realize these are not the venues for us...they are home to the "typical" big white weddings, which is the complete opposite of what we are looking for. For starters this is going to be a small wedding, and I mean small! There will be some family and friends heading to Ireland from Canada and England, along with those already in Ireland. In total we are talking about 40-ish people. As I mentioned, we are looking for something in the autumn, so an outdoors wedding is out of the question (although my first trip to Ireland was in October 2010 and the weather couldn't have been more perfect for an outdoors wedding! You know you can't rely on the weather over there!). So I am left looking for an intimate, indoor venue, something that doesn't look like your typical "event venue" or "banquet hall", something warm and homey, full of character, something unique and where we can have GREAT food and drinks. I would also love to work in some DIY's but since we will be far from home, it may be challenging, but I do want to incorporate some handmade decorations if possible - I just can't see having the over-priced flower arrangements, the usual white table clothes and chair covers with <insert your choice of accent colour here>. At this time I am open to suggestions!

So this may be a shot in the dark, but if anyone has any wedding planning tips, and has any ideas in Ireland, please let me know!!! Oh, and to make things more of a challenge, we are looking at south-western Ireland, County Cork, Kerry or the surrounding area. I am not saying it is a challenge because there isn't anything decent in Cork or Kerry - I am sure THE PERFECT place exists, it's just not making itself easy to find like venues around Dublin...everywhere I look it's Dublin this or Belfast that!!! What about the south?!

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