Ah, wedding planning checklists. There are the all-purpose timelines that include everything from ‘break in your wedding shoes’ to ‘head off to your honeymoon‘ included thereon. Then there are item specific checklists, like wedding dress shopping timelines and timelines for hiring a wedding caterer. They’re useful – if you happen to be on the first leg of your wedding planning journey 16 months out (which, coincidentally, is when you ought to be putting together your wedding binder and booking your officiant).
Some of us, though, live dangerously and only take nine months to plan a wedding. Or, like my own mother, a mere six weeks! Obviously, those ginormous wedding timelines are only going to be of so much help. And they might even make wedding planning seem like a herculean task – omigosh, I’ve only got eight months to go until the big day and I haven’t even launched my wedding web site! Eek!
So I’m super curious to know how much of a role wedding planning checklists and timelines are playing in your life right now (or whether you used them at all when planning your once upon a time wedding). Have you found a great one you’re following to the letter? Or have you decided that the traditional checklists don’t really gel with the kind of wedding you’re trying to plan?
I rejected “The Knot”‘s timeline when my fiance and I set a date for 6 months after our engagement, and never looked back. We’ve got about 3 months left and everything is falling into place beautifully, I don’t know what the big deal is with starting to early.
No one at Manolo for the Brides thinks you were operating on a crazy timeline – our readers have planned weddings in months and even weeks! The main benefit to starting earlier for a lot of people is usually that there will be a larger selection of wedding vendors available if a couples gives themselves plenty of time. If you only have a few months, it’s more likely that the best vendors will already be booked.
Hi! Where is this picture from? I’d love to check out the rest of this wedding, thanks!
I think I downloaded every checklist i could find when we started getting serious about the planning, about a year out. The first thing I did was cross out everything that didn’t apply (and that was a lot). What I found helpful was to know how early “most” brides would be doing things like booking vendors – in part to know how much the vendors would freak out about how “late” I was booking, or whether i was “early” or whatever.
Toward the end, I used them purely as a checklist to make sure I hadn’t forgotten something, like taking the centerpieces to the venue….