Diary of a Boho Bride – Sarah & Del. Entry 5: Admin – Wedmin

It’s Friday afternoon and Happy Halloween from both of the Kelly’s! Friday means it’s time for another Diary of a Boho Bride.  This time we are back with Sarah and Del. Last time they talked about ‘Outside Caterers, Priorities & Budgets’ Today it is all about Admin. Or as they like to call  it Wedmin!!!

I’ll pass you over to Sarah and Del…..

How’s the planning going? Hope all is well. We’ve been pretty busy with life in general this month, and so naturally, we’ve looking at getting organised for the wedding. I’m sure Wedmin is everybody’s favourite topic(!) and so as it’s been the most dominant part of wedding planning this month, we thought we’d write about our experiences of it.

Before we start on wedmin though, another update on the preparation. We’ve just come back from another planning trip in Glasgow, where we met with Claire Digance, the Humanist who will be performing our ceremony and Chris from Bespoke Catering. We hadn’t met either before, so it was good to put a face to the name behind emails and phone calls. We’re happy to say that both meetings went really well – really productive as well as enjoyable – success! With Claire we discussed weddings, Humanism in general, and as we were explaining Sarah’s sheer determination to marry outside. No matter what the weather she managed to soak Claire by knocking over her orange juice! Super cringe! But thankfully she was lovely about it and we could carry on talking about options for the ceremony. There really are so many options for Humanist ceremonies, we’re going to have to sit down and discuss exactly what we’d like to do.

Our chat with Chris was also really helpful, as we spoke lots about food (one of our favourite subjects!) and more importantly the timings of the day itself. He talked us through the typical run through of the day and how timings can be really vital in terms of what people remember of your day. Timings were something we knew we had to think about, but we hadn’t really discussed it in depth, in part because it hadn’t been necessary until then. As a result, we’ve made decisions about what time the ceremony will be, when the canapés are served, the time for the meal and made a decision about timings of the speeches. And most importantly, we know what’ll be the best time for us to cut the cake! Chris also spoke to us about tables. Believe it or not, the shape of tables has been a big sticking point between us and now we’ve made that super-important table shape decision. Wedding planning can be ridiculous at some times! So all in all, a productive weekend.

Picture 1 Source Picture 2 Source

Apart from the planning weekend, we have been doing lots of wedmin. Until we started wedding planning, wedmin wasn’t a concept that was on our radar, but now it just seems to be something we do and talk about regularly. But it is a really weird concept. Our friends who aren’t wedding planning think it’s bizarre, but there is so much admin involved in planning. The way we feel is that wedmin is the point at which your wedding turns from a fun activity to feeling like work. And so we’re not very good at it! But we want to show that actually, if done well and efficiently, you can make things easier for yourselves. And so, with just over 6 months to go until w-day, this month we finally got around to something we should have done a while ago – putting together a real wedding spreadsheet!

As next month marks the 6 month marker, we’ve got lots of payments due. Our budget is made up of lots of little pots of money in different places and so we needed a way to ensure we made payments on time as well as checking we actually had enough money saved ourselves to cover costs. We’ve so far had a bit by bit approach to wedmin, with a few spreadsheets recording some payments made, and some suppliers we had contracts with, as well as an approximate guest list. So, we pulled all of that information together into one big spreadsheet, and made sure that each of the pages talked to one another. We now know exactly how much we’re spending on the wedding, and if any guests drop out/are added, the spreadsheet will automatically update. So now we have a document that accounts for all costs.

The small things – from insurance to stationary for save the dates – and the bigger things – the venue, photographer etc. We also have a schedule of payments to be made, and payments already made. Putting everything together meant that we could allocate pots of money to specific suppliers, and so now we know exactly what we need to pay and where to take the funds from. It wasn’t the most exciting task, but it took about 3 hours and now it’s off our minds, and we have a really useful document for controlling our spending. So in all, that’s three hours well spent.

How do you keep on top of the organising?

Love Sarah and Del

xx