Wedding - September 30, 2019

What I’ve Gotten Done So Far + When and Where We’re Getting Married!

brighton keller wedding planning

Hey y’all! Hope you’ve been enjoying the wedding content so far – I honestly have been DEEP in planning and between that and the move, life feels all kinds of crazy and exciting at the same time. My goal is to bring y’all along for a lot of the planning because it’s just so fun and I know there are a lot of y’all planning weddings right now too, so I’ll keep sharing things little by little here and on Instagram.

Today I thought it’d be fun to do a quick update of what I’ve gotten done so far with the help of WeddingWire. My mama flew in to help with a few things and man, it was SO helpful! There’s just something so calming about having your mom help and she keeps me focused on getting things done lol – so many options out there for every. single. detail. Also, excited to share when and where we’re getting married which is in my list below!

Finalizing band

Duncan and I are both fans of live bands at weddings but this is actually a really hard task! Unless you’ve seen a band you love IRL, every band has a different style and it’s kinda tricky finding one to go with the exact vibe you’re wanting. We’re going to have lots of ages so we wanted a group that was fun and energizing, but could also play to the different eras at the wedding, you know? We’re working on finalizing this and I’m really excited about who I think we’re getting!

brighton keller picking out flowers wedding planning

Narrowing down florists

OK so I haven’t got this done yet but I do feel like we’ve made a lot of headway which is HUGE. Florals are HARD. Mainly because there are so many good vendors and every account I look at I’m like yep, this one…and then I see the next that’s even prettier and yeah, it’s a thing. I will say I finally made leeway on narrowing it down after searching for florists on WeddingWire.

Have y’all heard of this or am I just out of the loop because I’m newly engaged? They have so many cool functions that I can’t even begin to list all of them, but one of my favorites has been the vendor searches. You can search by city (I’ve been searching in Austin and Dallas since spoiler alert, we’re getting married in Austin but I also like working hands-on with certain vendors here in Dallas), budget, type of florals you want, etc. You can do the same type of searching for all types of vendors, but florals are what I originally looked for on WeddingWire! They helped me narrow it down to a couple that I’m visiting soon. For now, I’m having fun playing around with different arrangements and getting a better feel for the vibe I want.

If I have time, I think it’d be a fun blog post to put together some of my favorite inspiration photos I’ve found on Pinterest. But I’ll be honest, there really isn’t that much out there that I love! I definitely want something more natural and less”done” if that makes sense. I love lights and candles too for accents!

Venue

We have a venue and it’s a place y’all have seen before! Any guesses?? It’s actually where we got engaged, Barton Creek in Austin. If y’all don’t know, Duncan is from Austin and we’ve gone several times since we’ve been dating – it’s a special place for him obviously and us as a couple.

The Omni is a place we’ve stayed at several times and it always just feels like us (if you’ve missed it, you can see my highlight all about it here!). You know how you have those spots where you fall in love with the setting, service, food, feel, etc? Yep, that’s how we feel about this spot! They renovated it recently and it just feels like the perfect place to get married and to celebrate with all our friends and family coming from out of town! Let me now if y’all have been here before!

Date

This was also VERY stressful because man, there are a lot of things to consider when choosing a date! Like venue openings, weather, how far away it is, if it falls on any big weekends (sporting events, holidays, etc.), and whether the people you love are all free, ha! After a lot of back and forth, we’ve decided to get married on January 25, 2020!

I’m so happy that it’s sooner rather than later and I’m actually very excited about having an “off-season” wedding. From what I’ve heard from friends who got married at similar times, it’s nice because vendors are less busy, people’s schedules are less busy (and they aren’t as burnt out), and you can kinda do something unique to match the season! Plus, the weather stays pretty decent in Austin year round so it wasn’t something we weren’t too too worried about.

Dress

MAYBE THE BEST PART?!?! Well, one of them for sure :) I’m not sharing my final dress until the day of, of course, but I have it and I LOVE IT! I can’t wait to share with y’all! I’m being extra and am getting another dress made for the reception and I might share more hints on that soon. I shared a little bit about my wedding dress try-on process in this blog post if you missed it! Also, I’ll be sharing an entire blog post after the wedding about the process of doing a custom dress – I’m so excited and it has been SO much fun!

Invites

We did this while my mom was in town and I actually loved this process! Invites, like my dress, weren’t really anything I had thought about before getting engaged but I found the whole process so interesting. It’s such a creative, beautiful process and I loved seeing all the different options (SO MANY OPTIONS), fonts, colors, and yeah, it was really cool!

I also used WeddingWire to look through some invite vendors and it was so cool because you could search by the services you wanted like engraving, printing, letterpress, etc. I basically learned all about invites on the site and then was able to find a few vendors I wanted to look more into. You can even request pricing so you don’t necessarily have to call a million places either!

Scheduled Engagement Photos

I feel like I’ve kind of lagged on this but we finally have a date (Nov 9) and location (Denver). Now I just need to figure out what to wear! Would y’all be interested in seeing a post on what to wear for engagement photos??

What’s Next?

  • Create the wedding website, which I’ll probably do on WeddingWire because a few of my friends did and said it was so easy!
  • Finalize guest list before sending out save the dates, get everyone’s addresses
  • Figure out what to do for registry and where to do it
  • Pack for Denver (ha! not wedding related but this is HUGE on my to-do list for LIFE).
  • Finalize Bridesmaids dresses
  • Start planning honeymoon! Yay!
  • Start planning bachelorette
  • Decide on florist after getting proposals back from the ones I met with
  • Engagement photos (like I mentioned above!). We aren’t using these for our save the dates because we don’t have enough time.
  • Decide on cake vendor
  • Hire a videographer
  • am I boring you with this list?!