3. Plan with immediate execution/ doing things immediately, because there’s no time to keep things to later. Procrastinating too much can easily make you have a long and overwhelming list of things not yet done, and that can push up your heartbeat when the wedding date gets closer. So, every day, ensure to do one or more things in your wedding checklist, and then mark it as ‘done’.
For any short-notice wedding, such as 3 or 4 months from start to wedding date, you should not be planning and planning and planning…
4. Start booking from the most important things first
That’s to ensure you’ll still be okay, in case you didn’t finish doing everything before the 3-month date, you know that the things that really matter have all been taken care of, and your wedding will still be amazing. That’s why in the above 3-month wedding checklist timeline, the schedule states to start from taking care of the venue, guest list, food (caterer), and drinks, photography.
- How to Find and Choose a Wedding Reception Venue
- Where and How to Find Wedding Vendors
- What to Look for In a Wedding Venue (9 Non-negotiables)
5. Find Food Vendors in Unusual Places
Finding available vendors can be hard when planning a wedding within a short space of time, like 3 months or less. You will find that many vendors are already booked by other people. Here are other cool, unpopular ways that people use to find cool catering vendors for their weddings and parties:
- Food and Drinks: Being short on time, it may be hard to quickly find a good wedding caterer. Most Nigerian restaurants also offer catering to weddings and parties, even popular and everyone’s favourite home-cooking restaurants. Just ask them and get their per-plate prices.
- Wedding Cake: Because you’re short on time, you should not be looking for the super popular bakers who are usually booked up, Instead, consider ordering your wedding cake from a good, but unpopular baker or better still find a big hotel or big supermarket that has plenty catering staff who can bake you a decent cake within a few week’s notices. You can use the hacks we discussed in a previous post to transform the cake to look bigger or fancier.
6. Be a Flexible and Open to Shift Your Initial Wedding Date a Little, if Necessary
Your 3-month planned date may not work for the good vendors in your area; maybe they will be available if you shift your date a little bit. Don’t box yourself into a date too tightly. Be open to adjusting your timing by one or two months if you find that shifting your date a bit will enable you to get a better venue and vendors.
That’s because the best wedding locations, photographers and makeup artists get booked up as far as a year in advance, and those are the must-have wedding things. So, if you find that the available dates for those key wedding vendors or the venue are an additional month ahead, you may want to shift to having your wedding in 4 months or 5 months, rather than the initial 3-month plan.
7. Minimalistic Wedding To-Do List
Short-notice weddings are overwhelming and make brides nervous. To Keep the overwhelm minimal, and stay focused, execute your wedding plans with a to-do list and follow it, checking the DONE things as soon as they are done.
8. Keep your wedding checklist/ to-do list minimalistic/ slim, with only the MUST-DO wedding things, or those things that really matter. That’s because extra detailed wedding checklists can overwhelm you.
9. Focus only on the Most Important Things and Skip or Delay the Rest to Later
When planning a wedding, there’s a lot to do, and the things-to-do can be overwhelming and make the bride nervous. In those moments, it would look like every single thing is very important and that feeling adds extra tension and pressure. The truth is that NOT EVERY SINGLE THING IS IMPORTANT, only a few things are.
The way to deal with nervousness is to focus on only the big things. Keep calm and first pick a few things to focus first on more energy and time on. Those should be your 2 or 3 must-have things you would not compromise anything for. Once you pick your 2 or 3 most important things to do, take it easy on doing the rest of the to-dos or wedding things.
There are a few things that must be there for a wedding to happen, and a few more that are necessary to make any wedding not-boring. Those are the must-haves. There are some wedding things that are just extras and that guests won’t even notice or miss them if they are not there. Focus on doing what really matters.
For a wedding in 3 months or less, what really matters are having the groom and bride, the ring, the venue, the wedding officiant (in the court registry or Pastor that will join the couple to say their vows), the guests, photography, the food and drinks, an MC and a DJ. Every other thing is an extra, nice-to-have IF THERE’S TIME OR EXTRA MONEY.
10. Skip any wedding extras that are not possible/ realistic to do within the limited time – such as souvenir, live band (a good DJ will do), video coverage (a good, professional photographer will do), etc. Some things are nice to have at a wedding if there’s enough time, but putting extra care into the must-have wedding things will ensure you have the most memorable wedding ever (then doing everything half-and-half).
There may not even be time to go for a marriage counselling, and for a short-notice wedding, the couple may decide to opt for just a court and traditional wedding or find a church or worship house that offers a quick pre-marriage counselling classes for engaged-to-be-married couples. There may not even enough time to have a trad wedding date set weeks apart from the white wedding, and the best option would just be to plan to have both the traditional and white wedding on the same day.
There may not be enough time to wait for that particular designer wedding gown or custom-made, latest aso-oke and in this short notice, you should look for the best alternatives, and go for it.
11. Be Realistic and Keep Things Simple
Be real about the size of the wedding you can afford, and cut your guest count according to your budget size. You should not be thinking of inviting 200 hundred guests when you have N150k. If you find a caterer that charges N750 for a plate of food and a drink for 200 people, that whole money is finished.
Someone with N150k wedding budget should be realistic and know that with that amount, they can only invite 50 guests (close family and a few friends) or less and should look for a free backyard or front-yard to do their reception and can only rent wedding gown and suit, and wear their nice, old shoes.
Let your catering budget break-down dictate your guest count limit, rather than using your ‘feelings’ to say speculate the number of people you want to have at your wedding.
12. Save time where you can – because you don’t have much time.
For example, instead of planning your traditional wedding separately (separate date, separate logistics) and white wedding separately (also separate logistics and time between the planning), you can save time by merging the two events (same date and same venue, a program of events that flows from one to the other (either trad to white or the other way), and a single reception party for the two wedding types).
- Same-Day Trad and White Wedding: Planning and Sample Event Program
- 3 Months Wedding Planning Checklist
- How to Plan a Wedding in 6 Months or Less
13. Don’t Be Rigid. Compromise When Necessary
You are bound to not get everything you want, how you want it when planning a wedding in a short time, such as 3 or 4 months, or less. Your dream wedding venue or photographer, makeup artist or caterer may not be available on the date you have fixed your wedding. Mai Atafo or any couture wedding gown or tuxedo designer you long dreamed of may not be able to complete the outfit on time for your wedding.
Whatever choices you cannot get, skip and move on to the next good and available vendor or service provider. Be prepared to compromise, because you don’t have the luxury of time. Also, compromising can help you offload a ton of pressure and make you feel lighter, look unstressed and fresh for your wedding day.
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please how much to hire a wedding planner in imo state
october.
Hello Petina. You can go on Instagram to search for wedding planners in Imo state, and ask them about their fees. Or ask a friend or relative who lives there to go find out for you.