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Message: [QUOTE="Mano, post: 2069123, member: 3300"] My wife and I spent all told about 18-20k on our wedding, my parents gifted us 5k and my brother 3k. We rented a beach side ($2500) home in Old Lyme with a good sized yard in the off-season, late September, rented a tent, chairs, borrowed hotel pans from my brother who owns a bar. We bought wholesale the things we could like table linens, napkins, plates/glasses/cutlery (Ikea proved to be cheapest and we then had plenty of these to stock our future kitchen, Restaurant Depot for the cutlery), and flowers (I think BJ's and also Stop & Shop will work with you on bringing in whole boxes of flowers you need, then my wife and her bridesmaids made the bouquets the night before). My wife put in a ton of work making all of the center pieces, signage, banners, decorations, etc. I spent less than 2k total on food and booze for our 75+ guests (we just set out all of the bottles and mixers and borrowed a kegerator from my brother) Prepped all of the cocktail hour foods the day before so that they would just have to be put out by the staff we assembled from friends, extended relatives and a coworker that were paid about a $150 each for the 5+ hours. My sister-in-law made the majority of the reception food the day before as well. We had my coworker man the grill and we served "elevated" cookout food (burgers with a bunch of toppings choices, candied bacon, potato salad, pasta salad, etc...). Justice of the Peace was about $500 including tip, DJ (who was the worst part of all of it since he arrived late missing the ceremony :mad:, couldn't figure out the thumb drive he requested and completely ignored the track listings and when to play them like we had discussed, and then decided to try "scratching" during one of those songs where everyone is trying to dance to the directions. IDIOT!) was $400 including tip ~ greatratedjs.com. Photog was about $1500. I'm sure there are other expenses I'm missing. Anyway, with the help of friends and family it all came together beautifully. Not the least of which is that one of my best friends family owns a home directly across the street so we were able to have cocktail hour on the yard there and use that house for staging throughout (thanks [USER=405]@Robertelamin[/USER]!). It was probably through a confluence of luck and timing that it all came together for us as it did (we also got to stay at the house an extra week for only $500 and had something of a honeymoon there), but the point I'm trying to make I guess is that it possible if you're willing to do some of the stuff you might otherwise enlist professionals for. If you can lean on family and friends to help out here and there though, you can definitely do it a lot cheaper than you might think (we only spent as much as we did because of the gifts from my family). PM if you have any q's. [/QUOTE]

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