Wedding 101: The Planning Binder

I finally bit the bullet and put together my wedding binder. For some reason I had been really resistant about creating an actual planning binder, assuming that I could just do everything digitally and online and never bother printing anything out. Then I woke up from that delusion and put my stage management skills to good use (finally, a real-world application!) and compiled my binder. I'm now in a much better place to sift through the huge number of venue options we have (in two cities, no less) and get started on making some for-real decisions.

There's nothing special about this planner - I used a 1" black 3-ring binder I had on hand and clear plastic divider tabs and colored paper that I stole borrowed from work. While there are countless numbers of specialty planners catered to wedding planning available for purchase, I decided to DIY this portion of the process, simply because Step #1 of Keeping My Wedding Costs Down is what I'm calling "Using What You Already Have to Make What You Need." There will be many things that I will obviously pay a premium for - venue, photographer, etc. Other things, like this binder, for instance, need not be an extra and/or exorbitant expense.

I also and intentionally didn't coordinate this to my wedding colors - primarily because I haven't picked my wedding colors yet, and secondarily because I'm not entirely sold on the idea of "wedding colors." The sea foam green paper was the most pleasant color of paper we had in the office, and the yellow of the binder tabs is standard - and as a result, I now realize that this binder is Packer-colored, so I suppose you can take a girl out of Wisco, but you can't take the Wiso out of a girl ;)

I spent a good while figuring out the exact headings (categories) and sub-categories I wanted to put in my binder - the main categories are displayed in each divider tab (12 in all), and each sub-category title got printed out on it's own separate piece of paper (accompanied by a little logo I drew up). In case you too are in the beginning stages of planning your wedding you can download the list here, or look below for a quick look:

I hope this has been a help to you - and thanks for reading the first of many wedding-related posts as I begin to navigate the rugged territory of PLANNING A WEDDING!