Most wedding planning sessions happen in fits and bursts, and the first major milestone is when you’re done booking your vendors. After you’ve booked all the major players in your day, you may be a little stumped on what comes next. You feel like you should be doing something, but what? After all, you won’t need to touch base with them or finalize plans until much closer to your big day.
Here’s our list of next steps to work on while you’re waiting for your wedding day to get closer. Accounting for these projects will make sure that you don’t fall behind and stress yourself out at the last minute!
Select Your Wedding Music
We can speak from experience: selecting the wedding music playlist always seems to be put off until the last minute. Cue the last week of the wedding, with both the bride, groom, Best Man and Maid of Honor frantically listening to Pandora and Spotify for hours on end, trying to find the perfect songs.
Get this task out of the way early. After all, you can always change up a song if you hear something you like better! Before the wedding day rolls around, make the following playlists:
- Ceremony pre and post-music playlists
- Ceremony songs
- Cocktail hour playlist
- Reception Songs
- Do Not Play Lists
You can also reach out to your DJ for help on these items and suggested lists.
Do the DIY
You’ve heard the horror stories. Brides and their full party up until all hours days before the wedding, frantically piecing together favors. If you’re DIYing a lot of your decor, the time to start is more than a few months before the wedding! That way you can break it into manageable chunks, plan crafting parties with your friends and family and stay on top of it in a way that makes sense.
Make Your Wedding Website
Although a lot of planners recommend doing this earlier, it’s really not a necessity until you send out save the dates. However, it can be easier to start this early after booking your vendors, by uploading wedding party bios, pictures, and Things to Do for out of town guests. Putting a lot of thought and care into your wedding website can help you in the long run, too! The more questions that are answered on the site, the less pestering from friends and family you will experience.
Create a Warm Welcome
This one is if you forecast a lot of out of town guests or family members who haven’t seen one another for a long time coming into town for your wedding. It’s a nice gesture to create welcome bags to place in out-of-town guests rooms, and even host a small mini-reception on the day most arrive to welcome them and give them a chance to get to know one another. You can even look into local activities or experiences unique to your area to provide as options for your guests. It’s important to extend hospitality for guests who are traveling for your specific wedding, as they’ve potentially spent a lot of money to do so. Planning the perfect welcome for your state or area is a great way to occupy the limbo state between booking your vendors and beginning the countdown to your big day.