Wedding Planning

Planning a wedding is hard.

Planning a wedding with a dry hire venue is harder!

Having a wedding planner makes it so much easier but oh my god I feel like there’s so much to do! People say that weddings cost a lot of money and that there are so many things to consider, and honestly, I hadn’t even thought about half of the things that are actually involved with planning a wedding.

With our wedding, there are several factors that have slightly added to the stress factor of planing our big day. Firstly, having a dry hire venue means that we simply hire just the venue itself. We then have to source all of the vendors, caterers, bar, furniture, band, DJ, marquee etc. separately!

Secondly, we live in Dubai, our family live in England and the wedding is in France! We are having to put in a bit of extra work with the coordination amongst the countries whilst also bearing in mind time differences. Additionally, we don’t speak French – honestly having an English wedding planner who speaks French has literally saved my life and my sanity! When we were first searching for a wedding planner, Ryan had set up a day of back to back calls to speak with different planners. Out of the six planners we spoke with, five were French, and although they had good spoken English, we would definitely have encountered some difficulties with the language barrier. I am so thankful for And Then We Got Married!

And Then We Got Married / Instagram

Also, the fact that we are planning a three day event – no, not an Indian style wedding – but having a family meal on the first night, a BBQ for all of our guests on the Friday and then the wedding on the Saturday, this has added another layer of consideration and cost to planning the weekend.

All of that being said, I am honestly having so much fun planning and researching for our wedding weekend. It’s great to have the knowledge of our planner who is on the ground and with amazing contacts but it is also fun to research and source different elements of the wedding ourselves.

The great thing about having a dry hire venue is that we can tailor it be completely our own. We have decided on the general decor and florals concept with our planner, without really having any restrictions from the venue. We have also been able to use the grounds of the Chateau exactly how we want to, so we’ve managed to plot different elements of the weekend at different locations around the venue. It’s allowing us to be creative and have fun in this huge project but we we also encountering factors that we wouldn’t necessarily have considered if we were using a traditional wedding venue / church / hotel.

We are both really excited for our next trip to visit the venue in April and we will be packing a lot into a few days whilst we are there! I will be meeting with my makeup artist for a trial; then both of our Mums are flying over to Paris so we can take them to visit the venue; trial the food and the wine; cake tasting and also to visit the hotel that our guests will be staying at locally.

We are seriously on the countdown now… 170 days to go!