Avoid These 3 DIY Mistakes
Seriously – Don’t even consider them!
In the first place, I want to start off by saying that I love diy projects. And I’m not against diy projects for your wedding day. Nearly my entire wedding was diy!! ‘Confessions of an Extreme DIY Bride’ blog post is in the making. No joke! I’ve been there. I’ve done it all! Literally! I want to help save you from the stress, tears, disappointment, and wasted money that I brought upon myself.
Your wedding is one of the most wonderful and special days in your life here on this earth. If your like me, you dreamt of this day most of your life. From the dress to the cake, the location to the invitations, the flowers to the favors. You’ve thought about every personal detail you want to include that showcases the love you and your future spouse share and the uniqueness of your personalities.
A wedding is also probably the only event in life that makes a perfectly sane woman think that she can realistically diy every aspect of her big day. Pulling it all off seamlessly, all the while sticking to her budget. Right?! Really?! Its laughable! And I can say that because this is exactly what I tried to do for my wedding. Please let me spare you the frustration and agony. Some diy ideas are definite no-nos when it comes to weddings. I surveyed over 50 brides and below are our top 3 wedding diy mistakes to avoid.
3 Things to Avoid:
#1 Food & Cake
So you love hosting dinner parties and holiday gatherings, and catering for 100+ people shouldn’t be too much harder. WRONG! Not only do you have to figure out how much food to buy to feed all your guests (plus appetizers) you also need a place to prepare it, cook it all at the same time, and keep it warm for several hours. Think about the food warmers, the serving dishes and utensils you will need to serve everyone. Plus you will need people to serve your guests, because letting them have a free for all buffet will usually result in no food for those at the end of the line.
Consider the costs involved in purchasing food, buying/renting/hiring items and people needed to serve the food, plus your time involved in buying/prep and cook time. When you add up all those costs you will usually find that its far more expensive to diy your meal then if you had hired a professional caterer. Unless you regularly prepare and serve food for 50+ people on a regular basis its a good idea to skip this diy project.
Similarly to food is the wedding cake and desserts. Before you start this diy project ask yourself. Can I even bake? Does it usually taste good? Does it look pretty? Am I a confident baker? While you don’t need an affirmative answer to all these questions in order to diy your own wedding cake, its probably a good idea to realistically consider the answers. Can your remain calm or will you be stressing about the looks, taste and wether or not its cooked through or raw in the middle.
Baking aside you will also need all the supplies to make the cake. Specialty cake pans and utensils, piping bags and tips, plus ingredients. You should also do a trial run which means twice the supplies. You will also need adequate space to store the cake, and a way to transport it. Don’t forget the dowels to support a tiered cake. Hiring a friend might seem like a good idea and helpful to your budget. But if baking wedding cakes isn’t a regular thing for them they might forget the dowels inside of your three tiered cake and it falls over in the car on the way to your venue (true story, yes it happened to my cake). Sometimes diy is just not worth it.
#2 Hair & Make-up
Yes you look fabulous on a day to day basis doing your own hair and makeup, but its not a good idea to do it yourself on the wedding day. Let me tell you why. First, you are probably wanting a more intricate and fancy hair style then your everyday look. While you might have practiced a few times and think you can do a pretty good job. Do you really want “pretty good hair” for your wedding day. And don’t you know it, your going to have THE worst hair day ever the day of your wedding and the pressure of keeping to your timeline will bring you intense stress and make creating your perfect hair style very frustrating.
Let the professional do what she does best. Not only will your hairstylist manage your hair and make it look twice as good as you could but she will also complete it twice as fast, allowing you to sit back, relax and enjoy your morning preparations.
On the same note, your make up is something not to mess with either. Trust this recommendation from a wedding photographer. Professional makeup is infinitely superior in photographs to diy makeup. Not only does pro makeup last all day, but it will also be the perfect color and enhance your natural beauty and will not leave you looking like an umpa-lumpa. If you feel beautiful on your wedding day it will make you more comfortable and confident and that will show in your photos. Be fierce not frumpy!!
#3 Floral
Shoving a store bought bouquet in a vase and placing it on your dining room table hardly compares to the skills of a florist. Unless your going for the simple homey feel, and thats perfectly fine, but most brides want a little more for one of the most important events in their lives. While a bouquet from a magazine looks easy enough to create, the simple answer is, it isn’t. My mother is a florist so I have quite a bit of knowledge in this area. There is an art to making a large bouquet. Consider a large bouquet of gorgeous roses. Yeah sure, you just bunch them all together and tie a ribbon around the stems, right?… Not even close! There is a specific way to prepare and arrange the roses so that the outer roses don’t snap under the pressure from the center roses. Didn’t know that huh??!!
If you want your floral to last your whole wedding day there is a specific way it needs to be washed and dried and refrigerated. You can’t expect your bouquet to still look stunning at 2pm on your wedding day when you purchased store bought floral, didn’t care for it properly and left it in a warm garage overnight. Don’t even get me started on corsages, boutonnieres, and a swag (the large floral arrangement that usually goes above the ceremony alter).
Floral is an incredibly time consuming project. You will probably need at last half a day if not a whole day (depending on how many people can help you) to complete everything. There is buying, preparing, sorting, arranging, packaging, and storing the floral arrangements. If you take on this project you will also need, scissors, floral tape, wire, floral glue, pins, ribbons, wire cutters, bleach (yes some things need to be washed in bleach to kill off bugs and pesticides that will spoil your floral), floral foam, oasis (wet floral foam), and containers/vases. And thats just the stuff I remember off the top of my head! Diy floral is no comparison to a pro florist. If this extremely long paragraph isn’t enough to stop you from this diy project, I don’t know what will.
Conclusion:
As I noted above, I love diy. I love photographing weddings that include many diy projects. Unique pieces made by hand are so special and really help to tell your ‘love story’. One of my favorite weddings I ever photographed was a diy succulent wedding. It was amazing, so much time and love went into everything the bride and her family made. It was just gorgeous and I live for weddings like that!
If your going to diy a project for your wedding just make sure to do it right. Choose projects that can be done months in advance! Stuff you can do while watching your favorite tv show and eating ice cream. 😉 Seriously though, you should be out getting pampered, getting your nails done, relaxing with your bestie’s. Not running around like a mad woman landscaping her front yard because she needs more greenery in the centerpieces, or dropping off lasagnas for family members to cook (yup, me again). Skip projects that need to be done the week of or day before your wedding. Anything time sensitive or perishable – absolute not!!!
To see the amazing DIY Succulent Wedding I mentioned above click here.
Let me know if you found this post helpful by commenting below. What other topics about weddings are you interested in? What diy project do you wish you avoided?
