Objective: a less expensive wedding decoration!
As soon as you start the preparations, you will realize that organizing a wedding is expensive. When drawing up your budget, you should know that 50% of the overall expenses will be absorbed by the wedding meal and the reception venue. This is the number one rule that no bride and groom can escape. We have already explained and given you our tips to organize a low budget wedding, but today we dedicate this article to the decoration of your wedding. How to reduce the cost of your wedding decoration? We have a lot of tips to give you! Here they are below.
Decide on a decoration budget and stick to it
If you don’t set a fixed budget from the start, you’re screwed! You’re going to buy things as you go along and the bill will go up… up!!! Knowing from the start how much you want to spend – or not – on your D-Day decorations will allow you to divide the budget between the different items. This is – as it happens – the following advice.
Consider the whole wedding decoration before buying anything
In order not to exceed your decoration budget and therefore save money, you must list everything you will need. To help you, here are the different items you will have to think about. Our advice: make an EXCEL spreadsheet with all these categories and underneath the sub-categories that go with them. The more detailed your plan will be, the more you will be able to project what is necessary or not.
Decoration of the reception room
Table decoration
Decoration of the wine of honor
Decoration of the secular ceremony
Decoration of the church or place of worship
Decoration of the car
Mark everything you think about ! You will then eliminate what you think superfluous, that’s the secret for a cheaper wedding decoration: make concessions! Oh well, we’ll talk about it in the next point.
Follow the decorating trends that suit you
Pinterest is a trap. The more time you spend browsing through its countless dreamy photos, the more you’ll get bogged down in desires that will surely far exceed the wedding budget you’ve set for yourself. You’ll have to make some concessions. You can’t have everything! As far as wedding decoration is concerned, there are different trends at the moment. On the one hand we see XXL weddings, with mountains of flowers and plants… and on the other hand a HUGE return to sobriety. Nature weddings, with a minimalist decoration and atmosphere. It is this fashion that you must adopt to save on your atmosphere of the D-day.
Do you really need tablecloths and table runners?
And are those chair covers really essential?
Use Pinterest in a good way. Not to frustrate you, but rather to inspire you on decorations you can actually make.
A pretty reception venue will save you money on the decorating budget
Here’s a crucial point and yet one that you really need to consider when you go to visit reception venues: the more there is to camouflage, the more it’s going to cost you! It’s better to bet on a reception place that is a little more expensive, but that doesn’t need any decoration because of its natural splendor, than on an ugly room that you’ll have to dress up to look pretty. And yes, decorating the walls and ceilings will cost you a lot of money in hangings, sheets etc…
And it’s the same for the furniture that is rented with it! If you need to add tablecloths, chair covers, table runners to hide the misery… when everything could be so nice without?
This is a very important point to think about before making any decorating purchases.
The thorny question of DIY: are they that economical?
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a DIY fan. We tend to think of Do It Yourself as a cheaper way to decorate… but you should know: it’s not always the case. When manufacturers mass produce, they make what is called economies of scale that you will not be able to make just for your wedding. On the other hand, DIY can allow you to create small decorative details for a small price.
Here are a few tutorials that you can find on the blog: offer Bee-wraps to replace the sugared almonds, driftwood place cards, burlap cutlery holders, rope napkin rings, rope balls (to decorate your tables), succulents as a guest gift, tulle petticoats for your little bridesmaids… we have so many ideas to help you organize your wedding. You’ll see that we will quickly become one of your favorite wedding blogs
Rent your wedding decor instead of buying
This tip is both economical and ecological, as you may have guessed. Here are a few decorative items that you can rent for your wedding instead of buying:
Vases
All furniture
All table linens
All the dishes and tableware
Photophores, candle holders, ashtrays
Chair covers
Arch for the secular ceremony
To rent your wedding decoration, we invite you to get closer to your florist, your caterer.
Search for good opportunities
What you can’t rent, you will surely be able to find at least second hand, which will always be cheaper than new – normally -. Scour flea markets, cash and carry stores and look for wedding decorations that you might like to buy. Many brides sell their wedding decorations after the big day: you could make a good deal.
What if we made arrangements with the bride just before?
Whether it is for the reception hall or the church for example, if you have planned a decoration or if your budget is very small, why not see with the wedding that will take place just before you if you can recover its decoration?
This will allow the bride and groom (well, especially their witnesses because they are the ones who do it most of the time) not to have to bother removing everything after the big day or the ceremony and for you to have a decoration already installed and at a lower price. You can ask your reception hall or your wedding party to put you in touch with the couple who will be getting married before you.
Borrow from the brides’ friends their decorations!
I’m one of those who has kept a lot of her wedding decorations and loves to lend them to friends when they need them. Well, I have less and less vases because sometimes they get broken but I am so happy to be able to share them with my friends and family! Might as well be used instead of gathering dust in a corner. So if you have newly married friends or friends like me who tend to keep everything “just in case”, ask them before you buy anything! They probably have lots of treasures they’d love to lend you to embellish the most beautiful day of your life. And it won’t cost you anything… well, I only ask for cash: Champagne.
Search the attic of your parents and grandparents
I was going to start my sentence by writing “grannies always keep everything”, but since I just announced right above that I did too, that means I’m old… well never mind, I’ll take it . Ok, so me my grannies (and myself) always kept everything. Their attics were filled with items that could be repurposed to decorate a wedding. Well, not the steam plant from the 60’s, but that vase that is gathering dust, those old glasses that would make beautiful candle holders or those empty glass bottles that you could serve water or wine in cubes… Hup! More savings!
Grow your wedding flowers in your garden
I have dahlias in my garden, I love flowers. I also have peonies, roses, those who follow me on Instagram know how much I love to grow my own flowers to make my decorations. Because for me it is out of the question to buy flowers that are not in season and worse: that come from the other end of the planet.
Contrary to what we think, growing flowers is not at all complicated! Dahlias require almost no maintenance, the same for roses. Weed from time to time, why not a little fertilizer or compost… and in good weather we have flowers continuously from June to the end of September! For the peonies it’s a little more delicate, but with a little training you’ll get there. Succulents grow by themselves and in the shade without even having to add water… here are plenty of ideas to exploit! So no, you may not have enough to decorate all the tables of your wedding, but it will still be as much savings for your wine of honor for example? or why not the bouquets of your witnesses and bridesmaids?
Your wedding decoration taken from nature !
I already talked about it in the article about nature weddings, there are, just next to us, lots of plants that grow by themselves and that are perfect to decorate a wedding. Example among all the examples: the pampas grass… when I see that people buy them when there are some in EVERY vacant lot! In any case, at our place , in September, it’s just crazy how much there is. And it keeps for a very long time. I’ve had mine for over a year and they haven’t moved. It’s free, and it grows back every year. So please, don’t buy dried flowers when they are all around you. And the same goes for foliage. I have a bay tree hedge – edible – I wouldn’t dream of buying any.
Bonus tip: Stop comparing yourself!
Turn off Instagram (except to see me wandering around my garden showing you my dahlias) and stop wondering if your wedding will be prettier than your squeaker or on par with everything else you see on the internet. Who cares how much your wedding decorations cost as long as you’re happy and have the wedding you want. That’s the only thing that matters.
