I was going to do this post on my four year anniversary, but then I got nasty sick and didn’t actually celebrate my anniversary or do anything at all except be semiconscious and hallucinate Teletubbies dancing on my ceiling. So, I’m posting it the day my husband and I actually celebrate our four year anniversary.

Our first anniversary was during the height of COVID, so we didn’t do anything, which kind of set the tone for all of the ones to follow. Our second anniversary we went to Dairy Queen. Our third anniversary I think we ordered in Lee Ann Chin or something. #RelationshipGoals, we are not. So this year we are DOING SOMETHING. Just three years late and only because we have a gift card to the Tavern Grill. But it’s progress, right?

Anyway, since I was AWNB (away while not blogging) during my original wedding time, I’m going to give you the scoop now. First, the details.

Budget

Our wedding budget was $10,000. Which sounds like a ridiculously large amount of money, because it is a ridiculously large amount of money. What’s even more ridiculous, though, is how for a wedding budget in 2019 it was a super small amount of money.

What We Saved On

• For a lot of our decorations, I shopped after Christmas sales, thrift stores, and my and my parent’s houses. Our 150 year old church had just been torn down and my parents inherited some of the church doors, windows, and candlesticks. We also used antiques I already owned like tables and trunks.
• We got married at my childhood home–the farm that’s been in my family for over 100 years. Since my parents live there, they were nice enough not to charge us anything. This also meant the party could go on as late as we wanted it to (and oh, it did!)
• We supplied enough beer and wine to float a steamboat, but we didn’t have any hard liquor.
• My husband and I stayed in my old bedroom and our guests were welcome to camp in the field-turned-parking area on the property. No hotel bills here!
• Our honeymoon was a 4 day trip up north at Giants Ridge Resort. We went Monday to Thursday so we saved a bunch of money on the unit.
• For food, we went with Famous Daves buffet catering instead of something more poshed and plated. We fed 175 people for $3,000 (and had enough leftovers to feed us for a year). Which again, feels like a lot of money, but isn’t in the wedding world.
• We had mostly fake flowers and greenery (bought on clearance/50% off from Jo Ann and Michaels!) except for the cake, bouquets, boutonnieres, and memorial table. The flowers we did get were from Hy-Vee and super reasonably priced. The florist looked at my inspiration pics and pointed me toward similar options that were more affordable, i.e. mini roses instead of ranunculus.
• We hired family and friends to marry us and play music at the ceremony (thanks again you guys!)
• We borrowed all the tables, chairs, and tablecloths from family (again, thank you!)
• We got three cakes from a small local bakery and they were half the price of the other bakers we looked at.
• We used Studio 220, which was super reasonably priced. It wasn’t necessarily a savings, per se, but could have been a lot worse! Two photographers shooting the entire day cost us $2,000 and we got to keep 750 photographs. At first when I got back the photos I kept thinking about all the things I forgot to have them photograph and and wished for a few more “artistic” shots, but four years later and I absolutely love our photographs. They are perfect for the price we paid.
• We got our invitations and programs through Shutterfly during a 50% off sale for about $200.
• The Groomsmen’s suits and ties were all bought in a post Christmas clearance sale at J. C. Penney. Each suit was only $75.

What We Splurged On

• We got the NICE toilets. The Louboutin’s of porta-potties. They were still only about $1,500, but that was 10% of our budget. No regrets, though. They had sinks, artwork, flushing toilets and Ed Sheeran serenading you while you wizzed out your drunken indulgences.
• I bought my wedding dress new for $1,000 at David’s Bridal. For some people, this would go in the ‘saved’ column. For me, it goes in the ‘splurge.’ Again, it was 10% of our budget and I didn’t realize until after that I could get the same dress for half the price (or less!) used on eBay or Poshmark. I encourage anyone to try to get their wedding dress used. The savings are crazy. My alterations were only about $60 to get the straps shortened and the dress hemmed (because I’m short as hell). My one regret is not using the extra fabric to make off the shoulder swag sleeves like I wanted.
• The weather was iffy, so we splurged last minute and rented two tents–one for the ceremony and one for the cocktail area.
• I was definitely not going to do my hair and make-up for this, so hiring a hair and makeup team to drive out to the farm was a must for me.
• We got a videographer (drone included) for $1,500. Which is a lot for a 3 minute compilation video + a ceremony video that we never remember to watch. I’m so glad I have video, but I wish I had more taken by friends and family.

Getting Ready

We all got ready at my parent’s house. Our wedding party was filled with family and mutual friends, so during the entire wedding process, I never wanted the parties to be separated. We had a couple’s/family shower and a joint bachelor/bachelorette weekend away at a cabin. The wedding was no different. Except for having two designated changing areas, we were able to spend the morning together, playing games, chatting, and sharing the same nervous energy. Until I actually put on my wedding dress right before the first look, I didn’t care how much my husband saw me.

The Details

I’m a sentimental person, if you haven’t already figured that out. I wanted as many details as possible to mean something. I chose our wedding date, June 22, because it was halfway between my grandparents’ anniversary (June 20) and my parents’ (June 24). I also wanted it to be as close to the longest day of the year as possible, so we could party in the sunshine as much as possible.

At this point, all of my grandparents were gone and my aunt had just died a few months before. I wanted echoes of them around beyond just the memory table. I was fortunate enough to have access to both my grandmothers’ wedding dresses, so we hung them up in the reception area. I had a basket of handkerchiefs for guests to take at the ceremony and made sure to have some that were embroidered with my aunt’s favorite bird. The suitcase that held our cards was the one my Grandma Busch took with her every time she went to the hospital to have a baby (8 times!). The place we were getting married was where my Grandpa Busch was born and grew up, and where my grandparents had lived most their lives. The tree we got married in front of was a sapling from a willow from Grandma Brooks’ farm.

Our wedding was two days before my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary and I wanted to honor them as well. The song that our Best Man sang at our ceremony was the song from their first dance. The doors and windows that surrounded our ceremony space were from the church they got married in. Our ceremony location was near where my dad proposed to my mom. The china that Erik and I ate from was my parents’ wedding china.

I wanted things that reminded me of an English Garden wedding like the flowers, lanterns, croquet, and fountain. I also wanted things that reminded us of camping and outdoors like our Trail Mix bar, a campfire, and the camping area in our field ‘parking lot.’ I wanted an element of the Harry Potter Great Hall by arranging our reception tables a certain way. I wanted pieces of the past like the antique trunk, chandelier, poetry books, and keys (which were also bottle openers!) tied on the napkins. All these things didn’t necessarily follow the same theme, except that they were all things that made me happy. I know I’m using ‘I’ a lot, but everything was discussed with Erik too, I promise!

The First Look

Erik chose to do a first look (I didn’t care either way) so we did one quick before the rest of our photographs. We were so awkward with all the cameras! They had to keep instructing us on what to do because we were like ‘okay, now what? what do we do with our hands?’ Somehow, the photographer and videographer made us look normal!

The Wedding Party

We had a large wedding party of eight bridesmaids and eight groomsmen (and most of them were related to me!). Erik and I each have one sibling, so we included them, six of my cousins, and eight of our friends. At the time we didn’t have any nieces or nephews, and I didn’t want to corral little children, so we opted to not have flower or ring children (okay sorry, that sounds like a horror movie thing).

Our thank you gifts for our bridesmaids were personalized champagne glasses, personalized tote bags, earrings, champagne, and robes. For our groomsmen, they got a monogrammed shot glass, their favorite shot, their ties, and socks with either little Henrys or little Louies on them (our dogs).

The Cemetery

You’re probably wondering why the heck there’s a section for “cemetery” in a wedding post, but it’s not a mistake! Like I said, I’m a sucker for sentimental. When I was younger, if you’d have asked me what my wedding looked like, I would have said it would be at St. Benedict church, where I was baptized and my parents were married. I would have said my grandparents would be there, front row. Well, a few years before my wedding, that church closed and was torn down. A year and a half before my wedding, my grandmother died. Six months later, my grandfather followed. They were both buried in the St. Benedict cemetery, even though the church no longer stood there. So, very early on in my wedding planning, I knew I wanted to spend part of the day at the church site, take pictures in the trees where my parents had their wedding photos taken and visit my family in the cemetery. The church is only half a mile from my parent’s house, halfway between their farm and the farm that used to be Grandma Brooks’ before she died in 2010 and we had to sell it. My uncle Steve and aunt Mary Elizabeth were also buried in this cemetery, so we laid flowers for them as well. I wanted to visit my other grandparents and Auntie Nancy at the cemetery in town as well, but we ran out of time that day.

The Ceremony

We had the ceremony next to the donkey pasture, in front of my grandmother’s willow. At the head of the space, on either side of the willow, were stained glass windows from St. Benedict that my father built frames for. At the entrance of the space, were two doors from St. Benedict my father built into an open doorway. Lining the sides were window screens from St. Benedict. I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the church that meant so much to my family in the open air. The only downside was it was expected to rain, and last minute I had to cover everything with a tent. This is my biggest regret about the day–not getting married under the open sky. Everything else was just as I envisioned it, though.

My uncle officiated our wedding and my cousin played “Here Comes the Sun” (one of my favorite songs) as I walked down the aisle with both of my parents. My cousin gave a reading and my sister-in-law read “Honey Locust” by Mary Oliver (one of my favorite poets). We did a tree planting ceremony for our unity ceremony while our friend and Best Man played guitar and sang “One Friend”–my parents’ wedding song.

I didn’t notice this at the time, but the guests said that Chester and Petunia, our donkeys, came up to the site and watched the whole ceremony right next to the guests. When it was done they bowed their heads and went back to their pasture.

Cocktail Hour

We had a self-serve “bar” with a refrigerated keg trailer and a lot of boxed wine. The shelf the wine is on was salvaged from an old DNR building up north. I wanted a fountain in the middle of the cocktail area so my parents found one on clearance at Menards (how Minnesota can we get?) and made it happen. The only downside was my little cousins kept trying to dump frogs in it and I had to keep saving the poor jumpy creatures. The wreaths around the lanterns were 90% off Christmas wreaths at JoAnn’s that I added flowers to to make un-Christmassy. For snacks we had a trail mix bar. I insisted on loading up on Easter M&Ms in April because I like the pastel colors so much more than the regular colors. That was truly my biggest wedding diva moment.

The Reception

We had our reception in the machine shed, a pretty plain, nondescript building, but it hosts a party really well. I just decorated the crap out of it with lanterns and garlands until hopefully you didn’t walk in and expect a Haybine to hit you in the face. We had a relatively small wedding–we invited 175 people and 150 people showed up. We had a huge head table and then four reception tables, arranged Hogwarts Great Hall style. Famous Dave’s did a buffet (though I made sure to have as many vegetarian options as possible) and Thirsty Whale Bakery made our Lemon Raspberry, Red Velvet, and Mocha Fudge cakes. We did all the speeches and the dances. I do not like cheesy weird traditions (though if you do, great, we’re all different!) so there was no shoe game, dollar dance, garter toss, bouquet toss, or anything else uncomfortable.

The Dance

Our first dance was Can’t Help Falling in Love (same as every other couple in 2017-2020), but Ingrid Michaelson’s version. We chose it because it was the first song we ever danced to, but honestly if I did it again, I would choose something that I connected with and loved more. One highlight was when they played “Island in the Sun” by Weezer in honor of my late aunt (at some point it became our anthem for her, which is weird, but it makes total sense to us) and my whole family flooded the dance floor.

My Advice if You’re Getting Married

• Borrow what you can and get what you can’t borrow used (or rented!).
• Ask for help! I had a bunch of family and friends who were awesome and helped do a ton of the work Thursday and Friday before the wedding. I couldn’t have done it on my own.
• Stay organized, in whatever format makes sense for you. Have a checklist, a schedule, a shot list. Make sure people know what they are responsible for and when they are responsible for it. If this is not in your wheelhouse, ask for help or get a coordinator.
• Tell people what you want and be clear about your vision. But also be ready to go with the flow and compromise when unexpected things happen.
• Know that all the details and little things (tying bows, steaming tablecloths, etc.) will take longer than anticipated.
• Don’t dwell on what isn’t perfect and just enjoy the day and have fun!
• Everyone is different, so feel free to ignore all of this!

Final Thoughts

It was such an amazing weekend. I couldn’t look or talk about anything wedding related for a solid nine months after this, because it was still too stressful (then after nine months a global pandemic hit, which pushed other stressers at the forefront of my brain, understandably). I’m finally at the point where I can both be happy I never have to plan a wedding again and sad that I can’t spend every weekend laughing and dancing and celebrating with my friends and family all in one place, in a space I decorated myself, surrounded by all my favorite people and things. There are always going to be things I would do differently if I could turn back time (“..if I could find a way…”), but I can’t, so why dwell on it? People had fun, we got married, we still had enough money to buy a house three months later, what more can you ask for? If I was given the option to relive that day, exactly as it was, every day for the rest of my life, I would 1,000 times over.