Tyler and Lexi’s Heartfelt Western September Wedding at The Urban Cowboy in Nashville, TN
A Rustic Country Wedding for Just £1500!! -Tanita & Devon
My goodness gracious me do we have a stunner for you today. Tanita and Devon must be the most thriftiest people I know.
It ‘s not often that you come across a bride and groom that have managed to spend just under $2500 on their big day (thats about £1500, here in the UK), but that is exactly what this couple managed to do. I love how they wanted to make recycling such as large part of their day, not only is it great for our planet (huge brownie points from me!) but you can recoup some of your expenses and avoid cluttering your home with left over bits and bobs which in most cases end up in your garage growing mould and being eaten by rats.
Whats more I think Tanita and Devon have created a beautifully personalised day, everything has been thought out and built with love and then shared with family and friends. Isn’t that epitome of marriage – working hard to create something together that you get to share with others too?
On that note I will leave you with Tanita to tell you more…
When deciding on the details of our wedding, it all came down to a few simple elements. We wanted an intimate, beautiful budget wedding, outdoors. We wanted to avoid buying as many things from new as possible, anything we did buy had to be re-saleable and anything that could be handmade, would be.
We own The Country Barrel Antiques in Coburg, OR, we specialise in rustic, country decor so selecting a theme was quite easy for us. We knew that our wedding shopping would be something that may take a while as we were determined to not purchase new things. We looked in the Farmer’s Almanac and selected a date that had the perfect weather and was about a year away. We immediately began perusing Craigslist on a daily basis looking for brides who were selling left over items. We also posted requesting a few things such as: (Wine Barrels, Vintage Doors, Burlap Sacks, Milk Glass, Chalk Boards, etc.).
First we were contacted by an amazing bride who was selling all of her ivory tablecloths, burlap table runners, chalkboards, and old doors. We purchased everything she had that we could afford (and even traded a few of our things when our funds ran out) and started a wedding closet to store all of our goodies. Next we were contacted by a wonderful man from a local winery who had wine barrels for $25. We scooped four of those up and decided we would put the old doors on top to make tables for the food. I then found a girl who was selling a handmade wedding dress she decided not to wear. She graciously let me have it for only $80. After that, we found a wedding rental shop that was going out of business and purchased all of her vintage milk glasses for $1 a vase and we had a family member cut wood slices for our centerpieces!
We absolutely love Etsy and even have our store for The Country Barrel, so we wanted a lot of our items to come from this handmade community. We started looking for invitations and save the dates and quickly realized these things did not come cheap. We found an Etsy seller, DIVart, that created digital pictures and sent her a document with what we were looking for to see if this was something she could create. Needless to say, she did an amazing job and designed the save the dates, invitations, and RSVP cards for $36! We watched the newspapers and saw that Office Max was having a deal on printing, so we had them printed and hand cut everything. We then saw on Groupon they were featuring bags of seeds and so we decided it would be adorable to have “Let Love Bloom” envelopes filled with wild flower seeds as our wedding favors. We looked on Etsy for the envelopes and found a shop called Adore Paper Design who had exactly what we were looking for. Favors done! We then began building everything for the wedding such as the vintage door alter, the direction signs, and the wood posts for the lights around the dance floor. This was a daunting task, although, we had a blast together. Then we looked on Etsy again when it came time to pick out Devon’s wedding band. We found a lovely hammered white gold band for $285!
The biggest blessing of all came when a photographer, Stevi Saylor Photography, announced on her Facebook page that she was doing a contest for a wedding package. We quickly submitted our picture and a brief description about ourselves. We waited to see which couples the photographer selected to be a part of the contest and were overjoyed when we saw we were one of the five. Then came the hard part: We had to have the most likes on our picture to win. So, I quickly decided that we would bombard everybody we knew on Facebook with requests to please vote for us. The contest went on for a torturous week and when we were announced as the winners, all I could do was cry. All of our dreams came true in that moment because we knew that everything would fall perfectly into place.
We were determined to not have any debt from our wedding and would only allow ourselves to purchase wedding items as we had the funds to do so. In the end, we spend a little under $2,500 for our entire wedding and after reselling our décor to other brides, we were only into the wedding approximately $1,500. Our wedding was absolutely perfect and we were blessed beyond words by all of the wonderful people we met along the way.
Super Suppliers: Photographer: Stevi Sayler Photography// Cake Designer: Sweet Life Patisserie//Floral Designer: TraderJoes //Stationery: DIVart// Submitted via: Two Bright Lights// Seed Favour Packets: Groupon// Favour Envelopes: Adore Paper & Design//
I have to say hats off to Tanita and Devon for their patience, research and organisational skills, its amazing how much you can save doing as this couple did? Some might even say it is impossible but I think they have proven that if you have very specific ideas of what you want your wedding symbolise then anything is possible.
Much Bespoke Love
Emily x
A great story of building a wedding with a good budget. I love reading stories like this. I don’t know if I’d count the photography contest as a budget tip, per se, but if I took away what we paid our photographer, I spent about the same amount on our wedding!