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On Wednesday, I told you all that my husband and I recently just got back from Jamaica. (Yes, it has been a tough transition back to reality.) And I don’t want to hold you in suspense any longer. Take a peek into our gorgeous trip to Sandal’s Whitehouse. And don’t you worry, outfit posts will come very soon!
Hello you, and welcome to inside the mind of an Obsessive Compulsive Designer.
For those who may not know, I just recently got back from my honeymoon; so, it’s been quite a while since I’ve sat down and written a post for you guys. I hope you all enjoyed the working girl mini-series last week while I was away! I sure had fun writing those posts for you all and I received so many wonderful comments and reactions to them. You make me feel so loved! 🙂
Speaking of love, I wanted to start kicking off all of my honeymoon posts today with a lovey post about our accommodations. (You know I wouldn’t visit a beautiful place and not take excessive amounts of pictures!) We went down to Jamaica to stay at one of Sandal’s gorgeous resorts, South Coast aka Whitehouse. We had an amazing time and the views were amazing no matter where you looked. More on that later, I wanted to dedicate this post to those brides to be out there researching various honeymoon locations. I knew we were going to have an amazing time; but, after visiting, I can officially say that Sandal’s knows how to treat their honeymooners right!
Upon arrival, Sandal’s makes sure you feel welcome and get a jump start on your relaxation (with help of champagne). Everyone gets a glass while you check in; but, after settling into our suite, a lovely butler brought a complimentary bottle of champagne and champagne flutes to our room for us to enjoy at our leisure. And enjoy we did! It’s hard not to enjoy while looking out at an amazing view! Later in the week, they left us a cute little package with a handwritten note from the manager congratulating us on our honeymoon, a sweet little door sign, and a form for a complimentary room service breakfast. (Which was much needed on a rainy morning towards the end of the trip!) It was such a sweet little gift and the handwritten note definitely meant a lot!
For those honeymooners that want to avoid the hustle and bustle of the Caribbean, I highly recommend the month of May as it seemed to be more deserted than I had anticipated. It made for a perfectly intimate honeymoon without being completely isolated. After going to an all-inclusive resort, I don’t see us traveling any other way ever again. It was so nice to just walk around without worrying about cost or if we brought enough cash with us. It was such a great time and I highly recommend Sandal’s Whitehouse to all looking for a nice getaway! Even if you think it’s going to be too much money, I recommend contacting a good travel agent in your area and have them look into it. I’ll leave a link here for a past post explaining the benefits of booking through a travel agent. You won’t want to miss it! I think you’ll be surprised at the kind of rates they can get you.
Leave me a comment below and tell me your dream honeymoon location!
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Congratulations on your engagement! Now, enjoy ruthless non-stop planning for the next year of your life. It’s a wonderful burden and I wish you all the best! Mwah!
I’m going to have the biggest, most extravagant wedding of the year!
Wow, why is everything SO expensive?
Who cares what kind of napkin rings there are!?
I just hope I get a piece of cake…
This is going to be the best day of our lives. 🙂
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Date night is the highlight of some people’s week but planning what exactly to do is another story. Coming up with something other than a movie night or a nice dinner is sometimes difficult, whether you’ve been married for 15+ years or you’ve just started seeing each other. Going the extra little mile and coming up with a really fun and unique date idea is a great way to impress your significant other. I recently was introduced to this great site that I’d love to share with all of you that will make date night planning a breeze for everyone! Eventbrite is a site where you can search for your city and it will pull up all the events going on in your area. I’ve gone through my area (small town in the Midwest) and found numerous unique things that I wouldn’t of thought of on my own. I highly recommend going over to their website and taking a look!
Here are some date night ideas that you’ll easily find on Eventbrite :
Concert
Wine/Craft Beerhouse Tour
Fitness Classes
Comedy Show
Museum Tour
Festivals
Happy Hours
Marathon
Theatrical Plays
Art Exhibitions
SOOOO Much More!
Eventbrite also has a feature on their site where you can create your own event. You can use it for friend/family gatherings or you can organize a larger event that’s open to the public. It’s a great way to get people together and involved with one another. Next time you are considering planning an event, I highly recommend using Eventbrite to help you organize and get the word out.
Leave a comment below and let me know what events you’d like to attend in your area!
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It’s Friday night and you’ve got plans with your friends tonight. Are you on time or 20 minutes late as usual? Keep reading for confessions of your punctual friend!
Little Patience for Tardiness
The Urge To Call As Soon As You’re Late
Can’t Fathom Why You’re Late
Arriving Everywhere 10 Minutes Early = On Time
Precise Routines & Routes
Frustration When Those Routines Are Derailed
Pushes You To Be On Time When Together
Gets Flustered When You Make Them Late
Loves You Nonetheless 🙂
Leave a comment below and let us know if you’re the punctual friend or if you’re the late friend! And, of course, have a great weekend!
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Today I wanted to talk about the fun stuff that comes after the wedding, the honeymoon! Planning your wedding is hard enough. Don’t add another stressor by planning your honeymoon too. Relying on a travel agent will relieve your stress and will also get you amazing deals. Here’s my main reasons I highly recommend getting a travel agent.
Fast
They can plan your whole trip within the time it’s going to take you to find decent airfare pricing. This is also a great benefit for procrastinating brides. 😉
Cheaper
They’ll find you the best rates for airfare and your stay. I’m not kidding when I say that our travel agent got our trip to cost literally half as much than when I was just looking on my own. This fact alone makes it a homerun in my book!
Free Service
They’re free to get you the best deals? No contest.
Packages
Packaging your flights and your stay not only helps the price go down but it also makes life much easier. Having your entire itinerary planned out by someone else will enable you to enjoy your vacation all the more!
Expertise
You can know exactly where you’d like to go or just know you want a beach (like I said to our travel agent) and they will pair you up with the best place for you. They are very familiar with the resorts that they send you to so you can trust that you’re getting your dream honeymoon no problem!
So, go ahead and Google some great travel agents in your area and forget about trying to take on all that planning yourself! Enjoy your wedding planning and let someone else work out your honeymoon details. Let me know your dream honeymoon destination in the comments below!
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How fitting to have this be the first post of this love filled month! Let’s talk about the very first wedding planning you’ll do after the excitement of the engagement has worn off. I don’t think many people realize that picking the date is such a huge part of the planning. Depending on the time of year, it will dictate the location, color schemes, flower season, outfit choices, EVERYTHING. Here are some helpful tips to help you narrow down the 365 days you have to choose from!
Convenience
This goes for you as well as your guests. You may want to wait until after graduation, or making sure you get married before you move across the country from your family, etc. As for your guests, if you or some of your most important family/friends are still students, waiting for summer/spring/winter break may be a good choice to avoid overcomplicating schedules. Making sure you take all the big milestones into consideration for yourself and your guests will ensure you all have a great time!
Season
Depending on the climate you live in may very well have a major role to play in selecting your date. If you are like me and hate the snow, having a winter wedding may not be for you. The season will dictate where you will have your wedding (indoor vs outdoor), what your guests will wear, and who may be able to make it (if you select the blizzard months your guests may not make the drive).
Significance
If you have any dates in mind that you would love to use for their significance, those would be a top choice. Your anniversary, Valentine’s Day, your grandfather’s birthday that you wanted to honor.
Colors
Many young girls dream of their wedding and Pinterest has made that habit all the easier over the years. You may have a color scheme in mind that you have decided you need to have. Depending on the colors, you may be limited to certain seasons where those colors look the best.
Spatiality
Another factor you may want to consider is the space between your wedding and other large holidays, birthdays, or other weddings. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm yourself, and others, by squeezing in too many events in such a short span.
All of these factors won’t apply to everyone because everyone’s opinions and tastes differ. Some people may want a wedding on a large holiday or may not care which season they get married. These are just helpful tips to keep in mind when you are completely unsure what date you want to get married on. I hope these helped narrow your scope! Happy wedding planning!
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Happy Wedding Wednesday! These centerpieces turned out super cute! This DIY can be used as inspiration for your own wedding or as a template. I will try to link all of the items I can find so you can order them for yourself! For my wedding I wanted glam with a hint of nature. I feel that these translated that feeling perfectly. I’m still so in love with these.
You Will Need :
Luckily for me, a family member had recently gotten married and had many items on hand for me to borrow. This helped save me on cost TREMENDOUSLY. I can’t thank them enough!
Firstly, I took the one table runner I ordered and cut it into 14” x 14” squares. The table runner is 14” wide so to made it pretty easy to eyeball a square. Once I had the table runner cut, I put it down on the center of the table. Lay your 12” mirror on top and rotate it 90 degrees to form the star pattern I did. The cylindrical vases can be arranged on the mirror. In the two shorter vases, I stuffed with branches from a local park. The tallest vase will get a few hydrangea stems. (I chose hydrangeas because they give a very rich and full appearance without using too many branches.) Fill all the vases with water. The water will help disproportionate the branches and make them appear bulkier so adjust as needed. Go ahead and plop in a floating candle in your branch vases. Add some of your small tea candles sporadically on the mirror. If you feel like it needs a little more detail, sprinkle some larger crystals into the mix for the added glam factor.
I absolutely love how these turned out. They looked amazing and added just enough glam for my liking. I encourage all of you brides out there on a budget to try out this DIY.
*All pictures were taken by Capture Life Portraits. Stay tuned to see more!
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After three and a half long months, I received the most expensive delivery I’ve ever received – my wedding dress. I am still as much in love with it as I was the first time I put it on. I think it somehow got more gorgeous over the past couple months.
Finding this dress was the most stressful process that I’ve done thus far in the wedding planning process. I had a specific taste of what I wanted in mind but had no idea what style of dress I wanted. This made it very difficult to describe what I liked to the poor consultants who attempted to help me. I went to four stores before finding the right store, and the right consultant, for me. Some of the earlier stores, I won’t mention any names, were the kind of store that the consultant was the only one allowed to peruse the inventory. Needless to say, every dress she pulled was wrong for me. I definitely had more luck at the other stores that I was actually allowed to look at their inventory (I don’t think that was too much to ask). However, none of the other stores had exactly what I was looking for, even though I had no idea what I wanted. I just hadn’t experienced the “This is MY dress” moment yet.
All this changed when I finally went to Stacey’s Bridal. It took me way too long to think of going here to search for thee dress. I purchased both of my prom dresses here and have always had the most wonderful experience. My consultant could read my thoughts like a dream and he knew exactly what I was after. I told him what designer I was looking towards for inspiration and he actually pulled that designer’s collection immediately for me to look at. Safe to say, I found THE dress in less than an hour. It was such a breath of fresh air to have a consultant who listened to me and watched my facial expressions when my words fell short of my thoughts.
Now, after all of the pain of looking for a dress I’m so happy to have it here and know that it looks just as beautiful as I remember. And thank goodness I don’t have to go on a drastic wedding fad diet to fit into it. It’s the perfect size and I couldn’t be happier! Of course, I can’t post pictures because of a sneaky fiancé. It’s safe to say I’ll post plenty of pictures of it in a year. 🙂
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For those who may not know, I LOVE planning. Planning big events, or even just a small get together, gives me life. Event management was always my back up career if design hadn’t panned out. So, planning my wedding is very exciting to me and I love every single moment. Planning – I love. The stress that comes along with planning? Not so much. Which is why my fiancé have been engaged for a year already and our wedding date is still over a year away. We’re an oddball couple for today’s standards it seems with a 2+ year engagement. However, my fiancé and I both wanted a long engagement. We were living together prior to our engagement so marriage really isn’t going to do anything different for us besides make it “official”. Why rush it? I’d much rather take my time and enjoy the planning without the stress of an impending deadline. So that is exactly what we are doing! Being a perfectionist isn’t exactly a great trait for planning such a big event; however, I’ve found a few tools that have been making the process a breeze!
Until I got engaged, I had never seen The Knot anywhere but now that I have been planning, I see it EVERYWHERE (and thank goodness for it). The Knot has simplified so much for me and really helped me open my eyes to how many little details need to be decided. I went ahead and purchased one of their books, The Knot Book of Wedding Lists, and a planner of theirs called The Knot Ultimate Wedding Planner. These two items have helped so much. First of all, how great are lists? This book of lists is a life saver and helps me prioritize both with scheduling and budgets. They bring up lists of questions to ask vendors and venues that I never would have thought of. Asking these questions saved me so many headaches and hidden fees along the way. It definitely helps me make my decisions much faster. I’m a big advocate for planners and this wedding planner is great. They provide numerous pages to fill in with your thoughts and desires from your vendors and your big day in general. They even help with colors and inspiration. (Which was not needed for a designer with thousands of wedding Pinterest boards in the make.) This planner is huge and allows plenty of room to add more material. When I was interviewing venues I kept all of the brochures and pamphlets they gave me in here along with my annoyingly diligent notes. This way I can keep all of my vendor’s information in one safe place.
Both of these books have been a GREAT help and definitely help me keep my OCD in check. 😉 I can’t wait to keep using these throughout this planning process. I’ll post the links to where you can buy these books down below if you’re interested. If you have a wedding coming up, I highly recommend!
The Knot Book of Wedding Lists : http://www.amazon.com/Knot-Book-Wedding-Lists/dp/0307341933?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
The Knot Ultimate Wedding Planner : http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Wedding-Planner-Organizer-binder/dp/0770433367?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
