We honestly feel our wedding went exactly the way we'd imagined it. Then again, we'd always imagined it having a few mistakes. :)
After a wedding, you always learn a few things that you should remember for next time. While we hope never to use these lessons ourselves, they can be useful for other couples:
- If you're doing photos outside, bring lots of water. Both for your bridal party and for the flowers. Also consider sunscreen and bug repellant for those not wearing makeup.
- Buy a Dryel starter pack for emergency spot cleaning. We only discovered this after the wedding day. We've uploaded a video here.
- Hand out responsibility to individuals, and make it clear what those responsibilities are. That said, we used a more chaotic self-organising approach, and it still worked.
- Organise a lunch, preferably in advance. This worked exceptionally well for us. We took the whole wedding party to Red Robin.
- Be very clear as to the role and location of people at the wedding itself. It can be madness when a key individual is suddenly AWOL.
- You don't really need a strict "order of events" at the reception. The people closest to you will hang around for all of it. Just prepare to be loud and assertive when you want attention for a particular event.
- Try to get your entire wedding party in one location for the morning of the wedding. If possible, rent an apartment and have everyone stay there for the night. It makes things a lot easier in the morning.
- Organise a sheet of key information (venues, phone numbers, driving directions) for the people in your wedding party, the photographer, etc. In the worst case, everyone should know where they're headed next or who to contact.
- If your venue is out-of-town, try to get maps or directions to absolutely everyone. We posted maps on our blog, and then emailed people a link to the blog. In hindsight, we should have just sent the directions in the email...
- Leave plenty of spare time in your schedule, and be emotionally prepared for things to go wrong. On a day this complicated, something will go wrong. That's ok. :)
Anyway, hope this helps someone! :)