Our Simple, Homemade Wedding
Weddings are such wonderful occasions! They are a joyful celebration of the happy couple and all that is important to them. If you’re intending to keep your big day simple, here’s how to plan your fuss-free, back-garden wedding.
Congratulations!
If you’ve found your way to this page, it’s likely that you’ve recently become engaged and are planning your own wedding. No doubt, you’re inundated with advice and opinions already, and it’s getting hard to see the wood for the trees. You’ll have been told that the average wedding in the UK costs a staggering £30,000! And little wonder, when those around you list off all of the “essential” elements that you must organise to have the perfect wedding day. You may be left wondering how you could possibly plan a wedding that fits your budget, or better suits your more simplistic, minimalist tastes.
So, let me begin by dispelling that myth. Legally, a wedding requires only a small number of key elements.
- Yourself and your spouse-to-be
- A registered venue
- A marriage licence
- Your chosen officiant
- Two witnesses
Everything else is an optional extra. And the only people who have a choice about which of those optional extras are included in your special day are – you guessed it – you and your beloved. So, it’s time to get your thinking caps on, and decide what is most important to you both.
Where to Start with Planning Your Wedding?
Remember that getting engaged is a milestone in itself. So, take time to bask in the love and joy of this momentous occasion. Seriously!
When you are ready to start thinking about your wedding in earnest, sit down together and decide on your budget. How much do you want to spend? What can you realistically afford? Will anyone else be contributing?
My husband and I really wanted to pay for our big day ourselves. We set our budget at £5,000 and politely declined any significant financial contribution towards our wedding, so that we could maintain autonomy over our plans for the day.
We then broke our budget down roughly to help us prioritise what was important to us on the day. Which of the optional extras did we actually want? Which were we willing to forgo? More on that later.
I kept track of all our spending throughout the planning process, and we actually came in just slightly over budget. Here is a breakdown of what we spent.
| Category | Cost |
| Marquee hire | £600 |
| Table and chair hire | £150 |
| Registrar fee and certification of venue | £500 |
| Wedding attire, including hair and make-up | £450 |
| Flowers, decorations and favours | £700 |
| Rings | £720 |
| Photographer | £1250 |
| Food and drink, including cake | £400 |
| Stationary | £100 |
| Entertainment | £200 |
| Total | £5070 |
Our Choices
My husband and I are lucky enough to have found our forever home already. It’s a beautiful old cottage with lots of character. We both felt very strongly that we wanted to get married here, and felt so fortunate to have the outdoor space to follow through with this.
With our venue already decided, we just had to choose a date. We had already been together for eight years before getting engaged, so we were both happy with a relatively short engagement. We chose Easter Bank Holiday weekend as we were mindful that most of our guests would have to travel a long way for the wedding, and we didn’t want them using up precious annual leave on our account. This gave us just shy of five months to get everything organised. Plenty of time!
Marquee, Tables and Seating
Hosting an outdoor wedding in early Spring in Scotland is, well, risky! We thought it best to play it safe and hire a marquee. Though the registrar, on their site visit to certify our “venue,” seemed to think we required a further back-up plan in case the weather was too dire to hold the ceremony in the marquee! “Sure, we could just get married in the kitchen,” we replied.
We used a local company, Caroline’s Catering, to hire the marquee, tables and chairs. They were fantastic from start to finish, setting up the marquee a few days before the wedding at no extra charge so that we could begin decorating.
And luckily we were blessed with a calm, dry day. So we were able to hold the ceremony in the marquee after all!
Guests
I am not very comfortable with being the centre of attention, so I was keen for us to have a small and intimate wedding day.
However, we both have large circles of friends who had been kind enough to invite us to their weddings. Whilst we knew that many of our close friends would understand our choice to keep things small and simple, we also knew that this could potentially be a source of tension and awkwardness.
After agonising over this decision, the realisation that it was entirely up to us how we planned our special day was so liberating! We opted just to have our immediate families, Best Man and Maid of Honour. This was definitely the right choice for us; we were able to spend quality time with everyone on the day, but also share plenty of moments alone as Newlyweds, without the pressure of having to entertain a large crowd of our family and friends.
Attire, Hair and Make-Up
A cornerstone of our way of life is making do with what we have. So George was very happy to wear a suit and shoes he already owned, and asked his Best Man to do the same.
Sadly, I didn’t own a suitable white dress. My vision was a simple, elegant, tea-length dress which would allow me to move around freely on the day. I was keen to find a dress that wasn’t overly “bridal” so that I could wear it again on other special occasions. Phase 8 had just the dress to meet my brief if their beautiful Caterina design.
My shoes were a vintage lace Mary-Jane style from Light in the Box. Again, not eye-wateringly expensive, practical and very comfortable to wear all day.
For jewellery, I already had the necklace and earrings that I wanted to wear; simple yellow gold with small pendants containing amethysts. My sister’s bracelet was my “something borrowed.”
I did my own make-up, which I kept very minimal using products that I already used and loved. My hairdresser curled and arranged my hair in a simple half-up do. I chose not to wear a veil, opting instead for this gorgeous hair comb from The Bobby Pin. It was a bit of a splurge, but so beautiful and elegant! And definitely something that I could wear again.
My Maid of Honour was an absolute superstar! The purple we chose for our colour scheme really suited her complexion, so she bought herself an Infinity Dress that she knew she would wear again and again.
Photography
This is an area that many couples choose to forgo when organising a wedding on a small budget, often asking their guests to take photographs instead. However, it was important to me to have professional photographs as memories of our special day, and we were willing to allocate a significant portion of our budget towards this.
We definitely struck gold with David Yule Photography. Dave met up with us for a pre-wedding photo-shoot, to get to know us and discuss our plans for the day. He really put us at ease with his relaxed manner.
Dave met me at the hairdresser on the morning of the wedding for some “getting ready” pictures, then headed on to the house for the rest of the day. He was able to capture so many beautiful, natural photographs. We didn’t even realise he was there a lot of the time, stealthily documenting candid, special moments. Definitely money well spent, and we would highly recommend!
Flowers, Decorations and Favours
We were let down by our initial choice of florist, and were left scrambling around trying to find an alternative just six weeks before the wedding. I did seriously consider learning how to tie bouquets and make buttonholes, but realistically I knew that I had already committed to enough DIY wedding preparation!
Lynn at Willow was absolutely outstanding. She immediately grasped what we were after; a rustic minimalist theme, simple thistle buttonholes for the men, chrysanthemum corsages for our mothers, purple and yellow tulips (my favourite!) in the two bouquets, and some loose tulips to put in the vases I had found in a local charity shop for our table decorations.
The flowers turned out better than I could possibly have imagined!
Onto the decorations within the marquee! My lovely friends were kind enough to organise a hen do, even though most of them would not be coming to the wedding. And they even went along with my request for help with making some bunting to hang inside the marquee on the big day. They really are amazing!
I bought a selection of purple, pink and yellow fabric from Fabrics Galore, and we spent an afternoon cutting out and sewing little triangles whilst sipping Prosecco and cocktails. I think the bunting turned out beautifully!
In the evening, we added some fairy lights and my sister brought along her spinning party light for some disco atmosphere.
I ordered little sachets of biodegradable confetti and the place cards for the tables from Cancer Research UK. This seemed to combine so many of our core values: acting charitably, keeping things simple and minimal, and being kind to the environment.
For the favours, I ordered some personalised packets of bee and butterfly mix seeds from Wildflower Favours. These went down very well with my mother-in-law especially; she picked up all the packets left on the tables at the end of the night and scattered them in her garden!
Catering
I am a very keen cook and baker. As we only had 20 people to cater for on the day, I decided to prepare all the food and the wedding cake myself rather than outsourcing the catering.
I made the large fruit cake layer about seven weeks before the wedding, and fed it with a couple of tablespoons of brandy each week to keep it moist. I also prepared and froze several lasagnes ahead of time for the evening meal. Two days before the wedding, I made a cherry cake (George’s favourite) for the middle layer and a small sponge cake for the top layer.
I spent the afternoon before the wedding icing all the cakes and preparing sandwiches for the lunchtime buffet. I actually really enjoyed having these mindful tasks to focus on.
My sister, our Best Man and his wife were absolute champions on the wedding day. They set out the buffet at lunchtime, and cooked the lasagnes and jacket potatoes in the evening. In hindsight, I would probably have hired a couple of local students with catering experience to help with this part of the day.
Entertainment
We chose not to hire a DJ or any other entertainment for our wedding day. Instead, we set up an Easter egg hunt to keep my youngest nephews entertained after lunch. We also bought some large garden games, which went down well with the adults and children alike! Croquet, giant snakes and ladders and giant Connect4 provided hours of afternoon fun, and have all seen plenty of use since the wedding as well.
I prepared a playlist with all our favourite songs for the evening, so we just had to press play and dance the night away!
Top Tips
Hopefully I’ve shown you that it is perfectly possible to have a wonderful, low-key wedding day on a small budget. Here is a summary of my top tips for achieving this:
- There’s no rush to start planning the wedding the millisecond you get engaged! Enjoy the moment.
- Set your budget first. Be realistic about what you can afford and include any contributions that you have accepted.
- Decide what you want for your wedding day and roughly allocate your budget accordingly.
- You may find that everyone suddenly has an opinion about what your wedding day should look like, and they’re not shy about sharing their disappointment with your choices. I would suggest setting boundaries early. Unless they’re contributing towards the cost of the day, they don’t get a vote. The only people who matter are yourself and your spouse.
- Choosing your venue and date really go hand-in-hand. If you’re hosting your wedding at home, you can choose any date you like! But if you’re hiring a venue, you may want to offer some flexibility for better rates. They often charge less for mid-week dates, and these can be available at shorter notice.
- Start ticking things off that to-do list! I recommend organising the most important things first – and this will depend on your priorities. For us, it was securing a photographer on our chosen date and booking the marquee hire.
- Keep all your receipts together and watch your budget closely as you continue to arrange the remaining items on your to-do list.
- If you have any DIY projects in mind, get started with these early. You don’t want to be up to the wee small hours on your wedding day making your favours!
- If you are keeping things very small and simple, consider whether you want your guests to muck in on the day or if you would prefer to hire a bit of extra help so that everyone can relax and enjoy themselves.
- When the big day arrives, remember that the main purpose of the day is getting married to the person you love. Anything else is secondary to that. So relax and enjoy – it goes by in a flash!
