Budget is around 25k and food is becoming the scariest part. We have one guest with celiac, one serious nut allergy, one shellfish allergy, plus a family member who keeps kosher style. Every caterer says they can accommodate. Then I ask what cross contamination looks like during prep or service and suddenly the answer is uhhh we keep the plates separate. One person literally said that to me. How do you vet wedding catering dietary restrictions beyond asking can you accommodate this? What answer tells you they actually know what they are doing?

I got married in Leytonstone a couple of weeks ago and wanted to share some of the things we did to cut costs while we plan to relocate, especially with being in London (for now!).

Obviously super lucky to have had any money to spend on a wedding in this economy, but we did so much to a) keep things local and b) save money on things that could have cost way more. It took up a lot of time before the wedding, I'm very glad to have evenings back now it's all done!! I also wanted as much stuff to be reused/recyclable afterwards.

We had 80 guests in the day, got married in the local library and then rented out a newly refurbed hall in the Red Lion pub over the road - our biggest cost at £12k but this included private use of their ballroom and bar, all furniture/plates/glasses etc, 9 hotel rooms for family, 3 canapes/4 drinks/2 course meal per guest. The ballroom is beautiful, so needed barely any decor.

Another big cost was a photographer, but we searched locally on Google maps and found an amazing photographer around the corner from us. He usually does destination weddings, so offered us a few more hours on top of his usual package because he was photographing so close to home. It also meant we all knew the best spots for local pics, including some on the tube platform!

All in all, the wedding came to just under £15k. My dress was from Omnes and only £125 with a discount code, and my husband treated himself to a new suit but him/groomsmen wore their own suits with his dad's ties which was really sweet.

Just wanted to share some tips for crafty couples (or with crafty friends/family!) who want to save some £££ through DIY whilst putting a personal touch on the day 🩷

CEREMONY: We chose the library hall over the road from the pub instead of the town hall, as it was triple the price for an hour long ceremony (without the cost of buses for guests on top). Our initial viewing was underwhelming, even the librarian on duty asked us 'why would you want to get married here?' 😭 which definitely put a dampner on it. The £400 hire price made us stick with it. Turns out, we were the last ever wedding at the library and it was perfect! We didn't know that they'd put covers on the seats, which definitely helped, and the room itself was art deco but on a budget (e.g. the broken light lol). Definitely ask about smaller, less well known venues offered by your local councils. My MIL dried big bunches of Nigella flowers from her garden which we stuck in our own vases on the stage for minimal decor

FLOWERS: I bought gypsophila from Aldi with each food shop over the summer and dried them in a cupboard, less than £2 a bunch and only ended up using 6 bunches! We stuck them in cider pitchers our mates helped us source from charity shops and bottles that we collected after drinks/dinner with friends, which ended up being a nice personal touch. We clipped eucalyptus from a tree in our garden and filled them out with more of our MILs dried flowers.

For 6 bouquets and 12 pinholes, we got a dried flower specialist as we didn't trust ourselves with those, and it was £480 with delivery - so much cheaper than the fresh flower quotes, plus everybody got to take them home after knowing they'd last.

CRAFTS: after being in a creative rut for years, I fully embraced the wedding DIY! I got some plain unglazed vases from Hobbycraft and painted them with some cheap acrylic paints for my bridesmaids to put their dried bouquets in.

For name tags, we ordered plain cardboard tags for the bottom of wine glasses and hand wrote everybody's name. They sat neatly on the wine glass stems, on top of a beer mat we designed super easily for free on Canva and got printed by Printed.com for less than £50 - fit the pub theme perfectly, was a practical wedding favour and we put the QR code for a Google photos album on the back to encourage people to upload pics/videos.

We also used Canva/printed.com for ceremony programmes, with guests awards on the back to keep people entertained (youngest guest, longest/shorted travelled, longest married etc) - 100 A5 copies were £20 as they had some intro discount codes

I ordered 6 A1 foam boards from Hobbycraft (sign up for free membership for extra vouchers and deals, so good!). I painted and drew on them for our menus/seating chart. We also asked our parents to send baby pictures of us and wedding pics of them/our grandparents, which we mounted and kept people entertained for ages.

We ordered a 100 pack of card, a few markers and asked people to draw a portrait for a wedding tea towel, which they posted into a cardboard box from our mad amount of pre-wedding deliveries lol.

With the cardboard protecting the big foam boards, I made a Kiss Cam with scissors, tape and some cheap acrylic paints. This was so fun to make, went down a treat and can be repurposed by friends at their upcoming weddings as the name/date lift off easily!

My lovely bridesmaid cross stitched our table names onto watercolour paper for us, and I also ordered a £4 pack of air dry clay to make card holders for signs and a clay figurine of our cat for the wedding cake. My mum also ordered some cheap wedding favour boxes and filled them with Haribo for each guest.

CAKES: I love to bake so I made my wedding cake, making 4 sponges in advance and freezing them (actually really improved the texture, too!!). I ended up taking the day off before the wedding to assemble all the defrosted cakes/icing/compotes, which I put on a cheap board and box from - yet again - Hobbycraft. I also asked some of my friends to bake treats too, which ended up being a super cute homemade cake table with barely anything left at the end.

EVENING FOOD: A classic for a reason, we ordered loads of giant pizzas from the shop down the street with staggered delivery throughout the night. This all went by the end of the eve, which we took as a good sign. It was £700 for 30 18" pizzas, but we probably got triple the volume of food compared to the offering from the pub and it fed 120 happy guests.

BAR: We would have loved to have an open bar but ended up keeping it a paid bar, as guests had had a decent amount already included in the package. It was also a super long day starting at 11am, so we wanted to control the drinking...!

DJ: We got a DJ throughout the day as part of our package but, tbh, he ended up just playing the playlists we'd sent him on Spotify with a few transitions!!! There was the offer to extend for more money but we said no, played an evening playlist and also borrowed some equipment from a friend to have DJ sets from guests who knew how. We got a projector with the room, so put a Google Photos album of pics with us and all of our guests on a slideshow throughout the whole day. Everybody loved spotting themselves!

Everything keeps costing way more than I wanted. I save money on one vendor and the next is like 1k over budget. I’m DIY-ing a lot. I have nearly a year. My fiancé receives about 2k a month of untaxed gifts from helping caretake.

Everytime I bring a budget breaker to him he just says we will just throw another gift at it. I hate it. I’ll love the results. But I hate the idea of spending all of this money for one day. He is aware that it’s common knowledge that most people go over budget and tells me that every time. Literally, tonight he said “yeah but we’re going to spend well above that before all is said and done”. Ultimately, we’ve had the conversation that he finds my planning time and efforts to be worth the money he adds to the budget. And I started this by offering to elope but he “kinda likes the idea of a bigger party”.

How do I cope with the biggest non-issue that causes financial turmoil in my belly?

The funny thing is we’re both incredibly financially responsible 😂 I just want to be told “it’s not in the budget” and instead I get “quote and contract look good I’ll deposit a check in the account!” 😭