'My wedding was under £2000!' Bride tells all ...

11:32:00 am

We all know that planning a wedding can be stressful, time consuming and let's face it, damn

expensive at times but there are ways you can cut down the cost and still have the best day of your life.

Sarah managed to plan her wedding on a budget of under £2000 (we couldn't believe it either) and she's kindly shared her top tips and advice with us, and of course you lovely readers .

Sarah tells us:

I think my top bits of advice would be:

1. Never use the 'W' word! As soon as you search for 'wedding decor' or 'wedding flowers', you double or treble the price. Try missing it out, or searching via colour instead - my 'white foam roses' were much cheaper this way.

2. Always keep your eyes open. When I saw red scatter crystals in the Christmas sale, I knew they would fit the bill for our wedding tables, and were 75% cheaper than the scatter crystals online. Same for the buttonholes, I had gone from florist to florist, and park to park looking for real flowers I could use, and then the perfect pack jumped out at me for 50p.

3. You CAN make it yourself. People charge crazy money because of the man hours that go into DIY jobs, not because they can do it better than you. Pick a few key details that will form a theme (a colour, a particular stamp, or pattern), and then you will have personalised stationary at a fraction of the cost.

Circumstances changed as I was planning our wedding, so we had to bring it forward by 6 months and halve the budget - I definitely needed to get creative.

The dress I loved was £700 in a bridal shop, but I found one very similar from an online retailer and ended up getting it made to measure for £80. The wedding rings that we liked were a few hundred pounds each, but we actually ended up MAKING OUR OWN white gold wedding bands, with the help of a jeweler in Edinburgh, which not only saved money but it made it so much more meaningful.

I handmade 2 tiers of the wedding cake, the stand for it, and all of the save the dates, invitations,

orders of service, place cards, confetti and favours for every guest, as well as putting together gift bags to occupy the children!

I also created a balloon wall to be the backdrop for the photo-booth I made, and all of the flowers were handmade too.

The tables were decorated with scatter crystals; pinecones that myself and my then-fiance had collected and painted; and were numbered with Poundshop frames that I painted gold, and put pictures of the two of us in.

The things that I couldn't make, I absolutely couldn't pay full price for, so I negotiated and haggled with everything - car hire, photographers, hotel for the reception, you name it. Emailing was my best friend, it takes much less courage to ask for a discount through the computer rather than on the phone or in person!

I can't believe how perfectly everything came together, it was the perfect Happily Ever After.

Sarah