Wedding Planning Update #2

Hi, friends! We are officially into two-digit countdown until the big day so I thought it was time for another wedding planning update. It feels like we have done so much but somehow still have so much to do…

Since I last shared about wedding planning, we have:

Ordered the wedding dress – actually crossed this off the list pretty soon after! Went to BHLDN as planned but didn’t love anything and we ended up going to another, locally-owned wedding dress shop, where I found the one! I still need to go pick it up and get it altered by my mom, but it was such a relief to have selected the dress.

Booked catering – I am so thrilled we are going to the Korean food for the wedding! Hope people are as excited about this as we are.

Booked hotel room blocks – Rex reached out to two hotels in Downtown Durham to reserve some room blocks for our out-of-town guests for the wedding weekend. #BlessRex

Made a wedding website – One random Friday, we hunkered down and picked a website platform (why are there SO many?! FYI we chose withjoy.com) to build our wedding website. It is pretty much minus some final touches (i.e. need to confirm with cater about the protein options before updating one of the Q&As, etc.)

Made a wedding registry – The registry (which we built on two other platforms and linked to our wedding website) is more of a work in progress but we have a pretty good amount of gifts added to the registry that both of us spent quite a bit of time picking out. We tried to think of what we specifically wanted vs going off a list of transitional wedding registry items!

Took engagement photos – Okay–this only took us half a year! We met our wedding photographer, The Anchor Studio, in Downtown Durham one free evening she had during her very busy May wedding season. She made us two hours of posing feel like nothing, and we’re so happy with how the photos turned out!

Booked a Florist – I’m actually working with the same florist from whom my sister got her bouquet for her courthouse wedding, which makes me feel so sentimental! Thankfully, she works on weddings with a range of budgets because our floral budget is definitely on the modest side. We’re still fleshing out the details but I’ve shared with her my inspiration for the bouquet, ceremony arch, and small centerpieces and I can’t wait to see her creations!

Reserved flower preservation -One thing I am doing a lot during wedding planning is listening to my older sister’s advice in terms of what she wished she had done for her wedding last year. Besides not having Korean food, she vocalized regretting not having her wedding bouquet preserved in some way. Since I’m working with the same florist for my wedding, I know I am going to have a beautiful bouquet that I would love to preserve forever. This felt like a splurge for sure but I have now committed! After some research, I decided on Bonnie’s Blooms, locally based in Raleigh.

Ordered invitations – This actually happened just last night (and I may have approved the “proof” this morning haha), and it feels like such a big accomplishment We thought about DIYing like we did the save-the-dates but we ended up ordering on Minted after finding an Art Deco style design we both loved.

A lot of the things we have accomplished in the last few months warrant another action on the to-do list (getting the wedding dress altered, finalizing things with the vendors…) but we’re tackling them one by one!

P.S. Ending with a few of my favorite photos from my engagement shoot because I am OBSESSED (clearly)!