Monday, March 10, 2008

Saving Money on Your Wedding: Flowers and Decorations


I am doing a series of posts on saving money while planning a wedding. Today I will talk about the wedding flowers and other decorations. My total amount spent in this area was $410.

Here are some tips and ideas to save money on your wedding flowers and decorations:

-Keep it simple. This one seems obvious but can manifest itself in many ways. For example, BankerGirl is planning on buying her flowers at the local farmer's market on the morning of her wedding, which I think is an awesome idea! For my wedding, I kept all of my bouquets small and limited who got flowers.

-Skip the roses. This was a huge money saver for me. Instead of dark red roses, I had dark red carnations in my bouquet and the bridesmaids' bouquets. All of the boutineers featured one single carnation. Carnations are so cheap and nobody will even realize the roses are missing. The funny thing is, my florist still put a few roses in the bouquets and the ring surrounding the unity candle. I just didn't have to pay for them!

-Use what's there. My husband and I got married at a wedding chapel, which was already tastefully decorated. I didn't spend a single penny on decorating the chapel. Their decorations were just fine for my non-detailed, non-picky tastes!
I also didn't decorate the restaurant we had our reception at. They already had candles on all of the tables. After all, do you remember what the centerpieces looked like in the last wedding you went to?
If you're more picky than me, you should still ask your church and reception site if they have decorations available to use and see if you can make at least some of them work. It will save you decorating time and money.
You might want to also see what Make Love, Not Debt had to say on the matter.

As you can see, there are plenty of easy ways to save money on your flowers and decorations. Feel free to leave additional ideas in the comments!

3 comments:

Ms. M&P said...

Good tips! Since I got married less than a year ago, I still have this fresh on my mind. One thing I did was to save money by using colors like white, pink, and red, which are available in lots of different flowers. Greenery is also inexpensive. And for the reception, we used lots of candles instead of flowers, which was beautiful but cheaper than flowers.

Anonymous said...

Great tips! Thanks for the additions :)

Anonymous said...

I like it - I stumbled on this site and it reminded me of my wedding. I think we had a few flowers people brought, but we must have had the cheapest wedding ever (check out my link). Several years later now, the wife is starting to wish we had spent a little more on fancying it up since all her friends are getting hitched with all the bells and whistles! :)