Our DIY Wedding: What is essential?

For the benefit of my friend who's getting hitched this year, I will be sharing our experiences during our less-than-a-year wedding preps. These are not sure-fire tips on how to carry out the perfect wedding, but I hope they can help you with your own planning.

As I have said, we had a relatively short engagement. I would have wanted a year-long preparation, but since we chose January for our wedding date and he proposed in the middle of the year (and I didn't want an engagement spanning more than 12 months), we had to speed things up. So I guess my first tip is for the guys: timing should be perfect, proposal including!

After days of admiring my nice engagement ring, it was finally time to get down to business. The most important question? What are essential? What are our priorities for this event? Of course, WE were each other's priority. The budget was also taken into consideration (second tip: NEVER go over the budget. NEVER!), but that's an obvious given. Who or what's next, then? Where will our budget go? To the gown? The ring? The reception venue? What can we do without? What shouldn't be taken out of the list no matter what?

For us, our guests were on top of our list. Yes, this was OUR wedding, but we wanted to share this event to people we love so we had to make sure they were in the same festive mood as we were. Most of our planning revolved around this objective of keeping them as comfty as possible. Food, the reception program, seating arrangements and even our wedding date were some of the things we took into consideration during our planning.