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3 Traps Your Ego Is Setting That Ruin Your Planning

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During your planning process there will most likely come a time where you are stressed out, overwhelmed and frankly just over it all.

We have all been there, we are being pulled in so many different directions. Expectations during this phase in your life are high and very few are immune to the negative effects that these expectations have on you and your day! All of a sudden all of the butterflies and excitement over planning your dream day are gone and you are ready for this part to be over and done with.

Sound familiar?

Stress and Planning Agony are the most common themes of weddings these days. Which is not exactly what you had thought would be the overwhelming feeling of your engagement, right? 

But there is good news!!  With a little intentionality that theme can be avoided. So today we are diving into the different traps that our egos are inadvertently setting during our wedding planning.

This one stings a bit but you have to put yourself in the shoes of the wedding guest. Be honest. You know that you have been there. This day is not going to be as important to the majority of the people that are coming as it is to you. Yes, your guest want the best for you and cant wait to celebrate your pending nuptials but they have their own life going on. Their days and weeks are not consumed with wedding planning like yours so there may be times that you feel like their enthusiasm isn’t any where close to yours about this magical day.

THE SOLVE: Acceptance & Grace. By allowing yourself to go into the planning process accepting that this day is truly most important to you and your fiancé, you are giving yourself permission to avoid feeling guilt over scheduling your wedding on a day when your friend has another commitment or when they want to talk about things other than wedding plans. Accepting that you are planning it for YOU to exchange YOUR vows in the fashion that best fits your situation as a couple, lets you kick the pressure that you have been putting on this day to accommodate everyone. You will also need to show a little grace when faced with people who are not as involved in the day as you wish they were. Your relationship will continue long after that day and you don’t want to be the Bride that made it an issue or was too wrapped up in her own plans that she wasn’t a good friend during her engagement.

You are not alone! It is so hard to be surrounded day in and day out with wedding inspiration and not want to incorporate these things into your day. AGGG! Everyday you are adding more pins to your wedding board and your list of DIY’s, vendors and things to do continue to grow. So does your stress and your budget.

It is impossible to recreate much of what we see on Pinterest from the styled shoots on a budget but that doesn’t stop us from setting our sights on that. Before we know it, our expectations have been set and when our expectations aren’t met, we feel annoyance and disappointment.

THE SOLVE: Check Your Ego At Pinterest’s Door. This is a hard one but one that is essential if you are going to avoid this ego trap. You have be willing to figure out your reality here. What is truly important to your love story. Your Ego is going to tell you that “it’s your day and if you want it, then you should have it.” The bad news about that is that often doesn’t fit in with where we stand financially. Start out your planning process with a very clear vision and objective of your day and then hold steadily on to that with the purpose to create your day full of intentional choices. Don’t let all the white noise on Pinterest distract you from your vision.

A good tip for checking in with your consciousness on this is when you see something that you like on Pinterest that you want to incorporate into your day, give your emotions a little test. Are your adding the peonies to your bouquet or that expensive photo booth to your must have list because you think someone will feel like you are so cool for having it? Will you feel judged for not having that as a part of your day? If you are having those thoughts, thats your ego talking, not your reality! So knock that off the list, you don’t need it. 

Ask any girl that has been through the wedding planning process and she will tell you that she didn’t realize that planning a wedding would be so hard. That there would be so many unknowns and issues that arise. That everything costs more than the internet says and that no matter how organized you are, you will be overwhelmed. But time and time again, brides go into this season with their heads held high and the attitude that they don’t need help. That they can totally plan a party.

There is a reason that Wedding Planning has become a high price career for many people. They have that party planning gene that a lot of people just don’t have and they have the resources that come along with being in the industry over time. They know the solutions to your problems before they even come up!

THE SOLVE: While we know that not everyone has the funds for hiring a big budget wedding planner, there are options out there for every type of budget to help you during the planning process.  Find resources that will help you navigate these unchartered waters. We have listed a couple of our favorite resources for brides working within a budget!

Favorite Wedding Planning Book: A Practical Wedding Planner by Meg Keen 

https://apracticalwedding.com/author/meg/

Favorite Overall Planning Tools: Bells Box 

http://bellsbox.com/shop/

Favorite Podcast: Bridechilla 

https://thebridechilla.com/be-a-bridechilla/

Planning your Dream Day shouldn’t have to involve so much stress (and let’s be honest, money) but inevitably it seems that we fall into our ego traps and before we know it, the process just isn’t that much fun. Finding a little acceptance for who you are and what your reality is will allow you to realize what is just a time suck and distraction for you verses what is really important for your wedding.

So here is your challenge today: Think about some of the areas that your ego may be pushing you to make designs that don’t necessarily align with your truth and eliminate them!

YES! You officially have permissions to knock some of those details that seem to be stressing you out or additions to your day that are costing you more money and energy than you really want to spend.

Do you have any areas that your ego is taking the lead in your planning process? Share with us in the comments!

Forget Comparisons And Let Your Wedding Bloom

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Yesterday I was in Yoga with my favorite yogie, (Annie Bolton of Yoga on Davidson) and like always, she started class with a quote to help us set our intentions. These are always enlightening and put me in a positive state of mind but this particular passage sent my mind down a different path than usual.

“A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.” – Zin Shin

Over the course of the class, my thoughts went to the pressures that couples feel during the wedding phase of their lives. Maybe you are one of those unique people who don’t let pressures of society or the impossible standards that have been set out for us to follow faze you… and if you are that is awesome! Keep doing you (and maybe share some of your secrets with us!)

But if you happen to fall into the camp that most of us seem to land where we find ourselves constantly competing and comparing what we have and what we want, to that of our friends, to every single pin on Pinterest or to every social media post that we see, this blog is for you.

First let me say that I am totally in the camp of drooling over pretty Instagram accounts and some days I fall down a rabbit hole where I am pinning 4 million plus pins. As a visual person, it is crazy hard for me not to see something beautiful and either want it or want to create something as visually pleasing…Clothes, Home Decor, Hair Styles….I am looking at you! This is hard enough just on your average day but you throw in being engaged and trying to plan a wedding on top of that.  It is hard not to size ourselves up and try to compete with all the pretty things and ideas in the world.

However, there are a couple of big problems with this phenomenon so I want to talk about what those are and how to try and avoid them so that your wedding can bloom into a beautiful day on its own.

1. Trying Too Hard To Compete Creates A Potentially Unattainable Idea of How Your Day Will Look. 

This is a pretty general and broad statement but I think it is something that all brides should be aware of. Many times when you see these gorgeous photos on Instagram or Pinterest that you save to your “Dream Wedding Board” they are from styled shoots. A styled shoot means that someone is working together with a team of awesome vendors who all have talents from across the industry to provide the picture perfect setting to showcase their talents. I have heard of teams renting out warehouses and styling photos for 4 plus days to get some of these shots. While this is great for creating inspiration for us and for promoting the amazing talent that is out there, it also creates this idea that you too will have that look. The majority of us do not have endless budgets to throw around for our wedding day so when we start adding up what we can afford, somehow it seems to diminish the beauty of the day because we can’t recreate that perfect image we have built up in our minds. While learning from others is important, trying to keep up with the Jones’ can be debilitating to us too!

2. Trying Too Hard To Compete Takes Away From Your Uniqueness 

Look through your wedding board after you finish reading this. Do you see more than one theme or style that you have pinned? Chances are you will find that you have several! When I

got married, I had looks from vineyard weddings to desert weddings and everything in between because I was pinning things that I thought were fun. It didn’t matter to me that it didn’t fit my venue, my style or my budget, they were pretty and of course I wanted a mini donkey in my photos with me! While I did tone it down and crossed the mini donkey off my list, there were still several things that I was trying to incorporate into my day that weren’t special to me, my husband or our unique love story. In the end, choosing to eliminate some of these things that were taken from someone else’s day, made our day more about us.

3. Trying Too Hard To Compete Creates Stress and Unnecessary Expenses For Your Day

When you are trying to recreate some of these looks, you may find that it is not as easy to put everything together to get a great finished product when you aren’t working with the experts. It should be noted that I am not discouraging DIY projects, but that you should go into your wedding planning with the awareness that things may not turn out like the photos you have seen. Or it doesn’t fit in with the feel of the day you are going for. At that point, you have spent time and money on something that you don’t end up using or can’t use.

So how do we make sure that we are being like the flower that only cares about blooming for itself and fulfilling its own purpose?

Start by trying to be intentional about your priorities for your wedding day. Before you start picking out color themes, defining guest lists, choosing dresses and narrowing down food choices, work out exactly what your main priorities are for the big day. If you go into your planning with a clear and decisive idea of what is important to the two of you, the less likely you will be to get caught up in the comparison game.

Once you have your priorities set out, you can move on to your budget to get an idea of how you are going to be covering the costs that you will have. Defining your budget will allow you to know exactly what you can afford. Since your priorities are all set, it will also allow you to see areas where you can have a little more flexibility after you make sure the key items of your day are taken care of financially.

At this point you can have a little more fun and start creating your vision boards. I recommend starting a brand new board on Pinterest where you can be deliberate as to what you are pinning. Choose to pin items that you truly have a purpose for and not just every pretty style that you see. Designing our wedding days with intent rather than at random will reduce the choices that you have to make.

And lastly know that you have the most important thing to help you bloom and that is the person waiting for you at the end of that aisle on your wedding day!

Happy Planning! 

All Things About Postage

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We are knee deep in pretty invitations this month and we couldn’t be more excited! One thing that can kill an invitation buzz in an instant is forgetting to account for all things postage. For our  #realtalkthursday  today, we are sharing our top 3 favorite postage pointers with you to help keep your invites buzz worthy! 


1. Assemble a full invitation and take it to your local post office. You may think you are fine stamping them yourself but if your invitations are an odd size or weigh too much, you could find yourself with returned invites due to insufficient postage. This can throw your entire timeline for a loop AND cause extra stress for you!

2. Have your invites hand processed. This means that you will take them to the post office and request that they be processed by a person and not a machine. This will ensure that those pretty invites that you have spent tons of time, money and energy on won’t get bent or warped when going through a machine.
3. Put a stamp on your RSVP card. YES. STAMP IT. You don’t want to make a guest pay for postage to your event. The less effort that they have to put into their RSVP, the more likely that you will get them back on time!

Follow these tips and your guests will be thrilled to open up an envelope of pure prettiness from you!

how to diy a wedding arbor

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Creating your Wedding Exit can be one of the most fun planning features of your day! We all know that wedding exit photos are some of our favorite photos from weddings. There is something about all the smiling faces surrounding the happy couple as they cheer them on to their new life together that give us ALL THE FEELS.

We love a good DIY and this is the perfect spot to push up your sleeves and make a statement piece for your wedding that is one of a kind. Today’s DIY comes straight from our time with the Big Fake Wedding in Knoxville last month. Bells Box had the pleasure of creating the Wedding Exit for the event and we knew that we wanted to make sure that whatever we did turned heads. The only problem? We didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg creating the moment.

Knowing that our venue had a glass entrance that would serve as both the entrance to the wedding ceremony and the grand exit in a downtown setting, we set out to create a gorgeous and budget friendly wedding arbor. Guest walking into our event would immediately feel the excitement of the day as soon as they stepped foot through the billowing curtains, as well as serve for a backdrop to some really awesome photos when our couple made their grand exit!

While we used this as a piece to frame the entrance of the wedding and for the main character in our wedding exit, this can also be used as a blueprint for an awesome backdrop for your ceremony.

Follow along below to check out how we did it!

Materials

FULL DISCLOSURE: We worked on this for 2 full days so if you are trying to budget time on this, know that you will want to start on this well before the week before your wedding!

THE MAKING OF THE ARBOR

First we picked out a tree that looked like it was tall enough and pretty symmetrical all the way up. Once we cut this down, we sectioned it off into 3 parts (one for the right side, one for the left side and one of the top.) By we, I mean my super handy & talented brother! Then we took off the small branches that were on each piece, leaving some numbs to add character and one larger one towards the top on each side to help stabilize the top section.

After the 3 pieces were cleaned up and the height that we wanted, we used a jigsaw to section out a 2.5 inch spot on the back of each post while the arbor was laying face down. Then we added corresponding spots on the front top piece for each side.

Hint: Think fitting Lincoln Logs together so that the posts interlocked with each other. 

After we fit the pieces together, holes were drilled through the back of both sides in the center of where the horizontal and the vertical posts came together. Make sure that your holes don’t come through the front, you simply want to be able to use this as an extra tool to secure the posts together. Using 5 inch bolts, we screwed those into both holes to make certain that we wouldn’t run the risk of our arbor falling down on our bride and groom! This also makes it easy to screw & unscrew, allowing you to partially dissemble the arbor to make it a bit easier for transporting to your venue and back.

At this point,  the frame work of your arbor is complete and you are ready to start mixing your concrete. We used quickcrete for ours. Mixing half the bag in each bucket (follow the instructions of what concrete you are using ) we then placed each side of the wooden portion of the arbor so that it would stand straight up in the buckets filled with wet concrete. Then you let it dry overnight!

In order for the arbor to dry standing straight up, you will need to prop it up against a deck or something that has an overhang so that your buckets can be directly under the wooden section. You do not want to have your arbor leaning backwards while it is drying or it will not be as sturdy and could fall. We ended up using our garage with the door 1/3 of the way open so that the buckets could slide under the opening a little bit and the wooden section could be propped up right. 

THE STYLING OF THE ARBOR

Next you are ready to style your arbor! Our theme for the night involved a Romantic Dessert Night so we used a cow skull that we had chalk painted white and dusted with gold spray paint as our main focal point on the top. We secured this on there secured with rope. We framed the skull with Ikea Sheer curtains that we stapled to the back of the top plank to make for a more dramatic & romantic entrance and exit.

In order to hide the tan buckets filled with concrete, we placed them both in olive baskets and styled them with burlap to help conceal. We topped these off with variations of cacti  and brown moss to bring home the desert feel. The result beautiful!!

However you decide to style your arbor to fit your day, it will be gorgeous and it will be a sweet reminder of the hard work that you put into making it so special! AND being strategic with your resources means that you can build a staple piece in your decor for under $50!

How would you style a wedding arbor to fit your dream day?

securing your vendors with ease

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Its almost Friday!! And that means it’s #realtalkthursday and today we are taking a cue from one of our sweet brides that is currently working on securing her vendors. This lovely is hyper organized, well informed and makes tough decisions in a pinch everyday!

The problem? When it comes to her own wedding, she is having a hard time settling on her vendors. This is a pretty natural problem that a lot of brides have. When we break it down, there is a lot of pressure, not to mentioned a lot of money, on the line. With so many options for every little detail out there from venues to flatware, the big question of “What if I choose the wrong one” is hanging over us during this process.

If you find yourself in the same boat, sit down and tackle one vendor at a time starting with your setting/venue. Follow these 5 tips to make the decisions making process a bit smoother!

  1. Look for patterns on your Wedding Pinterest board
  2. Ask your bestie for her advice
  3. Narrow down your options
  4. Stop searching for more inspiration
  5. Keep the main WHY of the day at the top of your list

At the end of the day, you will marry the love of your life regardless of spot you choose to say your vows or what table settings you have!

values & reality: creating a wedding budget that fits you

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Earlier this month The Big Fake Wedding asked us to writing a blog post highlighting some of our favorite planning tips. We knew right away what we wanted to talk about because before we dive into the centerpieces and dress options, we first have to figure out our budget. Check out http://thebigfakewedding.com/values-reality-creating-wedding-budget-fits/ for the full scoop and other awesome wedding inspiration!

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For most of us, planning a wedding is uncharted territory and it can be a bit hard to wrap our heads around how much weddings cost when we are starting our planning process. Unfortunately, all of the beautiful images on Pinterest don’t put a price tag on the pretty things we have been drooling over. All of the effort and the time that goes into planning the picture perfect day can be completely diminished with one swift kick to your budget. So where do you start so that you can answer the question of how much your wedding is going to cost and how do you create a budget that reflects your values and your reality?

Bells Box has a five-step process for our brides to help guide them through creating their budget.

1. Speak Freely & Be Realistic
Many couples don’t know how to broach the conversation of a wedding budget. For most, even the reality of their financial relationship is a little hazy at this point. In order to plan a realistic wedding budget, first you will want to have a firm grasp on how you will be handing monetary issues going into your life together. After that you will be able to start navigating through setting out your wedding budget. It is also during this phase where being realistic is a must! Go into your planning with a clear understanding of what you, as a couple, want from the day.

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2. Educate Yourself
The wedding industry is unlike any thing that the majority of us have ever been exposed to. If you go into this venture without taking the time to do your due diligence, you will be guessing and assigning arbitrary dollar amounts to items. When the time comes to add everything up, you may find that you have over spent or over committed yourself. We like to go by the rule of thumb is that most things wedding related are going to cost 3x or more than it would if it was for any other type of party. Don’t let that scare you though. With a little inspiration, proper guidance and a strong budget mapped out – your dream day is well within reach!
3. Take Inventory
By giving yourself the benefit of taking inventory of what resources are available to you prior to “dream spending” for your day, you will have a better grasp of what you are working with. When you sit down with your fiancé, make sure that you talk about what contributing sources that you are going to have for your wedding. We encourage you to think not only about who will be chipping in financially but also about people in your life that can help in other ways. Whether it is with time and a helping hand on DIY’s or a friend that specializes in something wedding related, taking note of this is essential in creating your budget strategy.

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4. Prioritize & Determine Reality vs. Dreams
You can eliminate a lot of stress and angst if you are proactive in building out your budget and know going into your day what your reality is. By making sure that you prioritize what you value most upfront, you won’t be as likely to get lost in a Pinterest whirlwind.

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5.  Use Your Tools
There is a reason that wedding planning is a legitimate profession. Planning a wedding is hard and as mentioned earlier, untraveled territory for most. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of hiring a planner to help us walk through the unknown so we encourage you to find resources to help along the way. There are lots of free resources at places like the knot.com or apracticalwedding.com that can help. For those out there that need a little more help, check out our resources at bellsbox.com that help bridge that gap between free tools and wedding planners. Our process creates a seamless agenda for our brides that give them all the resources and assistance they need to create their dream day. All while keeping their budget in mind!BB3-2