Let's Get This Show On the Road

alexshep09

I recently got engaged, as in less than a week ago, and I already feel the need to start planning. My fiance and I are wanting to wait at least a year and a half, but I have this overwhelming feeling of needing to plan everything out right away. I waited a long time to become engaged and now I'm ready to just push full ahead with getting the wedding going. Anyone else feel this way? Any ideas on how to relax and try to enjoy engagement??

formerlyCooper

Congrats on your engagement! And I felt the same way. I haven't taken breaks along the way so much as I do one task, take a week off from planning, and do another. Recently as my wedding date gets closer I've been having to add more tasks, but it's all been pretty manageable so far. I'm sure you'll do fine! And the regs on here are a wonderful source of information should you need someone to bounce ideas off of.

cnf2013

My engagement is a year and half and I felt that way in the beginning too. It's exciting and over whelming. Figure out your budget, a preliminary guest list, and have an idea of what kind of wedding you want. Then start venue hunting and pick a date. 

My advice is to space things out. Then you'll always have something to work on without being overwhelmed. I will say, doing it that way has caused me zero stress so far, basically zero hiccups along the way, and we're slated to have nothing to do the week of if we stay on schedule right now. I would pick a vendor each month to research, meet with potential ones we might pick, and make the deposit. So the first month we did our venue, the next month our photographer, the next our DJ, etc. Once we nailed down vendors we moved onto things like decoration ideas, WP attire, food choices, and now we're working on final details. And once we get all our rsvp's back it'll only be tallying final headcounts, labeling place cards and doing our seating chart. Then we should be all set. You can easily map out a similar schedule. I'd highly advise it. Like I said, we've had pretty much zero stress and should be done with everything at least a week out. 

Oh, and congrats!

tiny speck

Congratulations! Definitely just take things one step at a time. It might seem like you need to do everything right this second, but there are a lot of things that can wait until much later once you've settled on a budget, guest list, and venue. We didn't book our cake baker until about 3 months before the wedding, for example.