Planning Our Micro-Wedding
Micro-Wedding, Micro-Budget?
Before Simon and I got engaged, we’d already talked about weddings: what we like, what we don’t like, and how incredibly expensive they can get. Now that isn’t to throw shade on anyone who dreams of a big, expensive wedding—if you want to spend $35,000 (or more) on your dream wedding, fabulous! I’m sure it will be magical and beautiful (and please share photos because I love wedding photos). For us, however, something smaller just felt right. As I mentioned in my wedding announcement post, my original plan was for us to elope. This didn’t happen. We quickly decided on a micro-wedding instead. Does having a smaller wedding automatically mean a smaller budget? Yes and no. You can spend a lot of money on your wedding even with a small guest list, but I do feel it gives you a lot more flexibility to spend as little or as much as feels right for you. We kept our budget fairly small, but I’ll go into greater detail about that later in this post.
Truth be told, I’d never dreamed of having a big wedding with loads of people. My dream wedding? Destination! When I was in my young 20s, I loved the idea of a destination wedding. It combined celebrating my marriage with one of my favorite things—travel! I also felt it gave me a bit more space to keep the guest list small. Simon’s dream wedding? His only priorities were to keep things fairly small and to see me in my dress for the first time when I walked down the aisle. Our micro-wedding hit on everything that was important to us—minus traveling to a fabulous destination, which wouldn’t have been very practical thanks to travel restrictions/Covid safety. Ultimately I’m not upset about that. We still had a beautiful wedding, we didn’t have to ask anyone to travel far to attend, and we still have plenty of opportunities to travel when it’s safe again.
The Venue, The DRESS, THE FLOWERS
We didn’t go out searching for a venue; our venue found us. Originally when I was still thinking of eloping, we considered a number of free places we could get married: the beach (the Oregon coast is a beautiful place to get married, but plan for a weekday morning if you don’t want strangers in your pictures), somewhere in the mountains, the courthouse, or even the gardens in front of our apartment. All of these locations are completely free for an elopement or a small ceremony, although some, like the beach, do require a permit if you want to put up a structure like an arch.
Simon and I officially got engaged at the Portland Rose Garden, and it was then when Simon saw the Shakespeare Graden for the first time. It’s a beautiful little spot within the Rose Garden with brick pathways, shaded grassy areas, flowers, tall shrubs that separate it from the rest of the garden, and even an archway. Basically, it’s perfect for a small, intimate wedding. So we called the parks office the following Monday and booked it for our wedding! This was actually our largest wedding expense. To get married in a city park, you have to pay for a permit. In Portland, this ranges anywhere from $204 to $750 per 2-hour time slot, depending on the location and capacity. I believe there are additional fees if you are doing a reception in addition to a ceremony.
After we booked the Shakespeare Garden, I needed a dress. I went through the process of dress shopping (and my runner-up dress) in my previous post, so I’ll skip that and go straight to the drama! Wedding dresses run notoriously small and it’s always advised to size up from your normal dress size. I am a size 4 and by some stroke of luck, they had a size 4 of my wedding dress in the shop that I could try on. It fit perfectly. However, the lovely person helping me still recommended sizing up. The wedding dresses I tried really ranged in pricing, but the one I fell in love with happened to be on sale ($390 vs $996 originally). BHLDN also gives you an additional discount if you purchase at your wedding dress appointment. I was very confident it was the one so I bought my dress at the appointment. Two weeks later, I saw that instead of the size 4 (as I’d tried on) or even a size 6, they ordered me a size 8.
This was no good! I called the store and they were very quick to apologize and ship out the dress in the correct size at an additional discount. Going against my gut instinct, I still sized up to a size 6. This was my own mistake. The size 6 was too big. While my mother was able to help shorten it up a bit, there was no way for us to tailor it to fix the gapping in the back and keep the sleeve from slipping off my shoulders. In the end, we padded out the chest and used “boob tape” to hold the dress in place during the ceremony. It wasn’t ideal but we made it work. Moral of the story? If the size 4 fits in the store, go with the size 4. (Similarly, after going all over town and failing to find the right suit and vest for Simon, we ended up ordering his stuff online and it took three tries to get the sizing and color just right. It all worked out in the end.)
Which brings us to the flowers! I’d set my heart on peach, sage, and terracotta as my wedding colors years ago, so I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted for flowers. I’d been pinning wedding floral arrangements in these colors to a vision board and noticed that a lot of the pins were actually of high-end silk flowers. I’d never considered silk flowers for a wedding until I got engaged. Since we were getting married in a rose garden, we didn’t need a lot of extra flowers for decoration, but I wanted something for our arch, a bouquet, and extras for our reception. I priced out real flowers and then I priced out silk flowers. Ultimately the silk flowers won out. It was super easy to get exactly what I wanted, at a lower cost, and, most important, I could reuse them for the reception happening about a month after the actual ceremony. They worked out beautifully. The setup at the garden was super easy, they looked great, and now I have them to treasure or reuse.
DIY-ING THE REST
For everything else in the wedding, we kept it real simple. The hope was to have a more casual vibe and not too much stress. I designed our invites on Shutterfly and signs to block off the garden so strangers wouldn’t wander into our wedding, I did my own makeup, my mom did my hair, a friend volunteered to be our wedding photographer (she did a beautiful job), and my sister sewed the cutest flower girl dresses for my nieces. I also bake my own wedding cake for after the ceremony. Instead of a full reception, we had wine, pizza, and cake in the gardens at our apartment. My original idea was to go to an Italian restaurant I love after the ceremony but with Covid restrictions, that wasn’t going to be possible.
Not going to lie, some things I had no choice other than to DIY. For example, my makeup. I looked at a lot of websites and portfolios of wedding makeup artists, but everyone was already booked. But the wedding cake? That was all pride. I take a lot of pride in my ability to bake, particularly my pastry work. Trust me when I say, Simon, my mother, my sister, and others all tried to talk me out of it. You really don’t need the extra stress of making your own cake when you’re a bride. But I was really insistent on making my own cake and baking a Croquembouche—the traditional French wedding cake. If you’ve never had one, a Croquembouche is a tower of choux pastries, filled with creme, wrapped in golden caramel sugar. I baked my choux pastries the day before but constructed the cake the morning of the wedding. I have never been happier with how a cake turned out than I was with that Croquembouche.
The cost breakdown
So in the end, did our micro-wedding have a micro-budget? In our case it did. Part of this is was because we got married during a global pandemic, but even if we had waited and planned something bigger or a destination wedding, we still would have budgeted $5-$10K. Let’s crunch some (rounded) numbers:
The venue/ Shakespeare Garden permit + fees: $800
Wedding dress (with additional discounts): $340
Suit pants, vest, and tie: $160
Silk flowers (bouquet, arch and table decorations, etc): $350
Flower crown: $68
Invitations/signage: $40
Cake ingredients: $25-$30
Wedding jewelry: $45 (bracelet from BHLDN)
Wedding shoes: $15 (JUST FAB and my something blue)
Nails: $20
Makeup setting spray: $25 (already owned the rest of the makeup I wore)
Wedding photos: $200
Marriage license: $60
Pizza and wine after the ceremony: gifted
All in all, we spent a little over $2000 in total. Now that could have easily been much higher. I wasn’t able to get the blue shoes I’d originally wanted ($370) and settled on the Just Fab instead because I knew I could stand in them comfortably for a longer period of time they are the particular shade of blue I liked. Buying a wedding cake would have added $350 or more. Real flowers would have been an additional $200-$500. If I’d fallen in love with a different dress…. Not to mention the cost of professional hair and makeup if I’d gone that route or if we’d had music at the ceremony. Needless to say, I’m very proud of how little we ended up spending. We pulled off a wedding that we loved and we didn’t compromise on anything important to us, despite a pandemic. Our honeymoon will actually be more expensive than the wedding! We’re hoping to go on that in early December as well as travel to the South of France in 2022 to see Simon’s family.
We had a very DIY-style wedding reception/party later in the summer for my side of the family, so keep an eye out for my do-it-yourself party tips in an upcoming post.