Planning a wedding - Steps 4 and 5! Colorado Wedding Planner

Here are the next steps in your wedding planning journey! 

Step 4 - Decide what type of wedding you'd like to have. Destination beach wedding in the Caribbean? Mountain top wedding in the Rockies? Winter wonderland or bright warm sunny day?
Step 5 - Choose a wedding planner if you can afford it. This will be the best decision you make, and one of the most important.

Step 4 - Now that you have your budget, you can decide what you'd like your wedding to feel like. I always recommend looking at this from a guest's perspective. Think about what the guest expects versus what they get. Think about how they feel when they walk in, eat, drink, and be merry. That feeling is how they'll look back and describe the event. I would recommend finding something interesting and unique about your wedding. I also advise to stay away from 'themed' events, and look at the event as a whole. Make sure it's a cohesive experience. Find inspiration in something that you love, or something important to the two of you. A great example - my husband and I are SCUBA divers, so we wanted to do a tropical, Caribbean wedding. I recommend hiring a wedding planner who works in the area you are interested in having the wedding so you can make sure to make the best decisions about vendors, weather, and locations. We work in the mountains of Colorado and the Caribbean - Mexico, Belize, The Virgin Islands, The Caymans, etc. We can help with both mountain weddings and the islands, as we have knowledge of the teams you can put together and the pitfalls that we need to help you avoid. Some great ideas for mountain venues can be found by heading over to the blog post we wrote about some of Colorado's amazing options. You need to find out what is important to you and your partner before picking a venue, not after! We recommend sitting down over a glass of your favorite beverage and making a list. Pick the top 3 most important things to you, and have your fiancee pick three as well. Then merge those lists. See if you have conflicts in your favorite things, and work those out before you pick the location. This will also help you in budgeting, to make sure you allocate enough of the budget to the important things! 

Step 5 - Choose a wedding planner. We recommend finding a planner who is familiar with your venue and the bumps int he road you might encounter. Most planners have 3 levels of service. The most basic is wedding coordination. Wedding coordination is usually inclusive of the last month or so of the planning process, as well as the day of coordination. It typically includes the 30 day walk through and rehearsal. The second level is Partial Planning. It includes the planner helping you through the major decisions, but not attending all the meetings, doing all the communication. The third level is full planning. It includes the planner helping you through all of the decisions, attending vendor meetings, and often making decisions on your behalf. Some things to think about when you think about wedding planners - 
1. You will be spending a ton of time with this person. Make sure that you get along with them! You'll both hate the relationship if it's not a good personality fit. 
2. Make sure they're experienced, and go online and read reviews! See what other brides and grooms have said about those planners, and make sure they're going to be a fit for you! 
3. Make sure they understand not only what you want as far as guest experience, and what things are important to you... but also make sure they know your potential venues! This is really important to making sure they help you over any hurdles you're going to face. ​