When you’re planning a wedding – you’re making so many decisions. Decisions about which vendors to go with, what food to have, what dresses your girls should wear, what hotels should you recommend your guests stay in? Decisions upon decisions. With every single one, you’re hoping that you’re making the right decision. I your mind every single decision will make or break
your wedding. The day has to be absolutely perfect. But yet, you’ve never done this before. How do you know that the decisions are the right ones?

My biggest piece that I would do over again would be:: Trust your gut! Go with your instincts. Listen to your heart. This would for sure be my biggest piece of advice. You have to do what is right for you – the amount of advice, words of wisdom and suggestions and ideas you get during this process, while encouraging and helpful. Quickly becomes overwhelming and very confusing. So take the advice, listen to the suggestions but ultimately go left or right based off of your own gut instincts.

So what else would I do over again?

1: Hire the exact same vendors!
Every single last one of them was INCREDIBLE! They exceeded my expectations. They made our wedding day go off without a hitch!

Venue| The Lodges at Gettysburg
Caterer | Carriage House Inn
Photographer & Photo Booth | C&I Photographers (all professional photos & Photo Booth photos below are credited to them)
Florist | Pretty Posies by Nichole
Cake | Once Upon A Crumb
Makeup Artist | Made You Blush
Hair | Lisa Fields
Invitations | Kindly R.S.V.P
DJ | Great Scott Productions (Scott was the DJ)
Wedding Dress | Maggie Sottero from Columbia Bridal
Bridesmaid Dresses | Venus Bridal
Suits | Venus Bridal
Nails | The Gettysburg Day Spa
Photo Booth | C&I Photographers

2: Make the event a weekend long occasion.
By going with a venue that was in PA, all of our guests had to travel to the location. They came in Friday night and left Sunday morning. Our venue offers cabins for their accommodations, we hosted a big rehearsal dinner and a big breakfast Sunday morning. It made the wedding last. We got to spend time with everyone. It was more than just one day.

3: Do a first look!
Since Claire Diana Photography wrote an awesome blog post about why to do a first look, that matches the exact reasons why I did one and why I loved our – I’ll just share that post with you. Head here for read the reasons.

 4: Hire a School Bus!
Bet you weren’t expecting that one. The Lodges had a limited number of cabins to rent (and we had them all rented) so when we still had guests that wanted to spend the night, we had to find another hotel in the area. Which meant that we had guests commuting to and from the wedding…and we had open bar. Those two things don’t mix well. We wanted everyone to be able to enjoy themselves but most importantly we wanted them to be safe! So how do you avoid having a bunch of DD’s but also keep everyone safe? You hire someone else to drive. But limos are just way to expensive for that. One of our family friends offered the idea of a school bus and he knew of a school bus driver up in the Gettysburg area. So we contacted him and booked the bus! Problem solved! We could cost effectively provide safe travel for our friends and family while also allowing them to fully enjoy themselves.

In everyone’s “welcome bags” they received a note that the bus would pick up them up outside of the hotel at 3:30pm. There would then be two different return times – 9pm (right after the reception) and 11:30pm about 2 hours into the bon fire.

 5: Move the ceremony from outside to inside. 
It was one of those really tough decisions. We just loved the outside location looking out over the rolling hills of Gettysburg covered in all this fall colors. But it was 45 degrees, wind blowing, bone chilling. There was no way anyone would be comfortable out there for 30 minutes like that, especially us girls that had next to nothing on. So we made the decision to move the ceremony inside. I couldn’t be happier that we did. Everyone was able to fully enjoy the ceremony, really focus on it instead of rushing it and shivering. We have people still tell us how intimate, beautiful and wonderful the ceremony was. They would not be saying that if we would’ve been outside.

6: Have a Photo Booth 
I had always wanted to have a photobooth at my wedding. I am so glad we spent the extra money and did it. It was a blast, it was the favors, it was our guest book. We now have a book full of the most hilarious images of our family and friends with notes next to them. We love it!

It’s a short list at the moment but honestly most of what we did for our wedding, I would 100% do over again! The day was absolute perfection.