Nervous/excited/worried

Https://happilyeverafteretc.com/free-wedding-binder/

I found these printables online if anyone is interested. Im planning on putting them in my binder

View quoted message Love seeing the 2021 brides. It may be far away but we are on the road to our own wedding. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one waiting and I love being able to connect with other brides

My wedding is also 2.5 years away. I feel the same way. It is like I don’t even know where to begin! I am glad I am not the only one in this boat.

I just kept looking up different timelines on line and adding the smaller details to the checklist on WeddingWire here. Whenever I had time to spare I would look at the list and find something that I thought I could work on at the time. It is totally possible you just have stay organized and don't let yourself procrastinate a whole lot because the time goes by fast. When we booked a venue and settled on the date we had 891 days till the wedding, today I have 60 and it seems impossible that I've had that much time to plan everything.

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I totally love this

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Mhmm, same here!

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Oooh I love the pdf format so much!!!!

View quoted message Thank you love, all this encouragement really helps along with knowing that I am on the right path of starting. Congratulations to you as well!

Its so easy to get overwhelmed, especially with so many options. Checklists are helpful and are a great resource for keeping you on track. I'm a dayplanner type of gal, and I have all my vendor payments and reminders written in it so I don't miss anything important.

This is a great community to bounce ideas off of. Its very cathartic to come here and vent sometimes lol, and everybody here is incredibly supportive and has great advise!

You're on the right track starting with venue and photographer! Start with building your vendor team, and tackle them one by one. The great thing is you DO have lots of time! Many vendors are filling up their 2020 schedules, and still have lots open for 2021.

We had a year and a half to plan our wedding. We booked most of our vendors over a year in advance, and I found that we basically had our pick of who we wanted (except for venue...venues book up insanely fast. definitely start there).

Congrats on your engagement, and best of luck planning!

The WW checklist is a great way to check things off as you have completed them. Take your time as your doing without the Wedding planner adding on their cost. A binder/folder does help to keep all your documentation together and the vendors info when needed. Do cover all your vendors ahead of time so you don't lose out on the deal before they get booked up and higher charge.

The WW budget also is great tool to keep the amounts in line and accurate.

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So much this!!

We're also having a 24+ month engagement, and planning from a distance (living in Thunder Bay, getting married London, Ontario) and I wasn't running out to buy a planning binder anytime soon!

I've found this checklist really helpful as well: I can't remember where I found it but I have a editable PDF version I can check off.

Another thing I found extremely helpful was buying a monthly planner/agenda, especially for the final year so I could write down the tasks I needed to complete each month, and it has daily pages too so if I do something wedding related (book a vendor, order stuff online, etc) I write down the day that happened for my records.

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Valerie you could not have said it any better!

By the time we get married, it will be 19 months of engagement, and there were so many times in the last year that I have second guessed myself, or thought I was missing something and was super nervous that not everything was going to come together.

This community has been so helpful! Use it as much as you can, ask as many questions! We are all here to help you in any way.

I am also not using a wedding planner, so I am a little scared as I am starting to get to the point where everything is coming together. It happens to all of us at one point, so no need to worry!

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This so much!

Although I enjoy having my physical binder because it's a memento after everything is said and done.

View quoted message Thank you! That really helps!

Totally! It's definitely overwhelming when you first dip your toes in planning your wedding! Don't worry, you'll find your planning style soon enough

We had a long engagement (24+ months) and planning our wedding from a distance (living in AB, getting married in QC), so we were worried about missing the boat on a few of our vendors for sure!!! You'll noticed that I've managed all of my wedding planning via my laptop, as I found the whole physical wedding binder too cumbersome and I kept going back to my computer anyway hahaha.

What's helped me the most, has been WeddingWire and The Knot's checklist/to-do list, as they keep me on track with items I should book, order or look up. The vendor manager is awesome, as you can list the vendors you want to contact, whether you liked them or not and write notes for each. The budget tool on WeddingWire is more user-friendly, so I've definitely spent more time on this website for sure!

On top of that, I have a bunch of google docs that I share with my FH. Those definitely helps me communicate what needs to be done with my FH. It's also helped us gather our guests' contact info under one document!

I asked for this book for xmas, after we got engaged, and it's helped me A LOT. It's based out of the U.S. but still has some great info to help you get started.

Finally, I have a folder on my laptop with a copy of each vendor's contract, as well as any ideas/inspiration or documents I might need to send to vendors (florist, DJ, officiant).

Happy Planning