In my last post, I talked about three things that Amanda and I did to save money on our wedding. Here are some more tips that helped us save over $10,000:
4. Go to the source
Amanda and I wanted to give small jars of honey as wedding favours. We shopped around and got a few quotes but the cheapest one came from the Bee Farmer that supplied the honey and bottled the honey himself on his farm. We ordered 200 bottles of 50g honey jars for $300 ($1.50 per unit) whereas other vendors would have been charging us twice this amount.
5. Do it yourself (DIY) wedding décor
We wanted to make our wedding day as unique as possible. We looked online for inspiration and came across a seating chart that was made from a wood pallet (often known as a wooden skid). We loved it so much we went ahead to find a wood pallet, painted it, and lined it up with strings and clothes pin so that it could hold each of our table/seating chart at our wedding reception.
Amanda loves calligraphy so she ended up learning how to do calligraphy for a lot of the things that we would be using for our wedding. For example, we picked up this old mirror from the thrift store for under $5, painted it rose gold, and she was able to write a welcome sign on it.
We bought wooden hangers to be used for the bridesmaid dresses, and she hand-wrote each of our bridesmaid names on the hanger.
If I had to put a dollar figure on the things that we made ourselves, it would have easily costed us over $1000. These are just some of the examples.
6. Make cheap things look expensive
Our wedding reception was held at the York Mills Gallery. The venue is darker than most because it doesn’t have any natural light going into the venue. We wanted to brighten up the room with more lights at each of the tables.
One of the ways we did this was by putting fairy string lights ($2 per unit at the Dollar Store) in spaghetti sauce mason jars that we also painted to put on each of our wedding tables. All of the 20 spaghetti mason jars we collected was from whatever we ate and from friends and family so it didn’t cost us anything. However, you’ll notice that by putting the fairy string lights inside the painted mason jars, it makes it look a lot more elegant than it is had we just left string lights on the table on its own.
On our dessert table, we wanted to include something that was inexpensive but something everybody would enjoy. We decided one of things we should have are donuts so we ordered four dozen donuts from Tim Hortons. After all, who doesn’t love donuts? We wanted to have the donuts displayed in a way so that it didn’t look “cheap” and more appetizing so what we did was rented a donut wall from McLean Sherwood Event Rental in Brampton for $50.
