Big Worry #2:Wedding Day Set Up

So my other big wedding worry has to do with getting the venue set up on the day of the wedding.

While we have a florist who will be delivering and setting up the flowers, all of our centrepieces and all other venue decorations, from escort cards to the card box, will have to be taken care of by myself and whoever else I can guilt in to lending a hand.

This isn’t the part that worries me. While I’m not really a DIY-er, I do like to organize and supervise and I’m actually glad that I have an excuse to go down to the venue before the wedding starts and help with setting everything up.

What I’m worried about is the amount of time I can spend doing that.

While our ceremony isn’t until 6:30 pm, we’re doing our photos first and I think the plan is to start doing those at about 4 pm. The photographer will be arriving at my place at 3 pm and shortly after he arrives I’ll be getting into my dress so that means my hair and make-up should be done by say, 3:15 pm.

Now I know some brides are probably a bit jealous of this timeline since they had 6am hair appointments but here’s where I run into a stress point: We can’t get into the venue until noon. So if I need to be back at my place by say, 1:30 pm for hair and make-up, I’ll only have an hour at the venue to get stuff set up (I’m allowing for 30 minutes of travel time).

And when I say “I”, I also mean my mother and sister since they’ll be following my getting-ready timeline.

While I can organize people to work pretty efficiently, there’s no way we’ll be able to get everything done in an hour and so I’m going to have to left the venue before it’s done being decorated and yeah, I’m really not comfortable with that idea.

The Berkeley does supply a day-of planner and I’m really hoping that I can in-list and then entrust her to at least look things and make sure they look right (I’ve already been told that the day-of planners don’t assist with things like actually setting up the centrepieces).

That way I, my mother and my sister can leave at noon and a handful of people (including Shawn) can stay behind and finish setting everything up under the eye of the planner.

But while that sounds like a good plan, it’s one that still worries me. What if the planner doesn’t have the greatest eye for detail? Or what if my helpers don’t? Or what if I can’t find anyone who can help with setting things up?

It’s this kind of thing that makes me wish that we’d gotten our own independent wedding planner. Too bad we don’t have the cash for that.