Thread: Just dawned on me....will have to get married soon!

OH has just found out his posting, he'll be sent to Woodbridge in Feb next year. We've discussed in the past that when he finally gets posted somewhere I'll go with him and at some point we'll get married.
It's just dawned on me that if he's going there in Feb, I'll be going there then too, presummably living in married quarters (I'm guessing you have to be married for accommodation?), so.... that means we'll have to get married before Feb! Aargh! we have no money, are moving in three weeks and I leave my job in December. How can I plan a wedding?
I don't think this is going to be the dream wedding I'd always planned. Looks like we might end up at the registry office with a couple of witness and a few drinks in the pub!

Have any of you got married on a really tight budget? Also does anyone know anything about Woodbridge? Any advice would help, as you can tell I'm pretty clueless

1. You can rent privately - we do.
2. You don't have to move til you leave your job and find another- I did...sort of
3. Get saving and good luck as I have no idea about Woodbridge.

What I can tell you is that if you want to live in SFA then you need to be married. And Mr B has just pronounced Woodbridge as a great place to live. Ex US Army and so the quarters are heaps better than our British efforts. Although we've never lived there so can't tell you that from personal experience. Big disclaimer there!

If your seriously thinking about getting married on a budget then it can be done, and well. I am sure there is a thread on here somewhere about that topic. Have a search.

I let Mr D believe that this will happen one day! hahaha the fool! BUT if you really want to get married on a shoestring there are options, as peeps said have a search on here if not here are some tibbits I have collected (from magazines and Mr Ds mates weddings etc)

1. Talk to a community Church they usually have licenses to marry and are MUCH cheaper than the posh parish church PLUS they have church halls which you can usually have use of as part of the deal.
2. Make your own wedding cake, I have made one for a friend on a budge and it is surprisingly easy, alternatively if you are not into baking (seriously its fun!) then tesco sell little white cakes that you can easily pop on top of each other for that "I spent hundreds" look.
3. Rent your dress or check out BHS they have really pretty ones pretty cheap. Oxfam also have a wedding dress shop and you will be helping save the world! if you can find a dress maker it can be cheaper to get one made too (talk to local colleges about their textile students, I know someone who did it and invited the girl to the wedding and other than paying for the material the girl did all the sewing for nothing)
4. Ask everyone to bring something for the reception (like a pot luck lunch or something) ask bride friends for savory and groom friends for sweet and you get a nice mix
5. buy your flowers from a flower market the day before and spend the "hen night" the night before putting them together or use silk flowers for the same affect but they don't die and can double as favours (and cos the same as flowers)

well thats enough for now when im not getting ready for work I'll come back with some more.

Dont know anything about woodbridge sorry!

Our marriage wasn't on a tight budget but we just didn't want to spend the earth.

Your biggest outlays are the notice and the registry office. Other than that, everything else is purely add-ons.

We had a cake made for us, my wedding dress is a ball gown that gets pulled out for balls, we hired a venue with a whacking discount as OH is military, paid for a small buffet and put a bit of money behind the bar for everyone.

No photographer, no 'favours', a home-made guest book. Didn't stop us from having a brilliant day and raising a stack of money for charity.

It can be done!!

And we don't live in quarters, but OH weekly commutes (when he's not at sea). You don't have to live in quarters, you can rent yourself.

The timing of your question made me smile because I am off to Devon tomorrow to the extravaganza which is my parent's Golden Wedding celebrations. Their original wedding was Registry Office and pub - both sets of parents radically disapproving and refusing to have anything to do with it - I am glad to say they came to eat their words - and now my darling Mum and Dad are basically having the wedding they'd have liked in the first place, 50 years later!

You can catch up on the bells and whistles later if you choose to but if you love him, start that happy marriage and be together. x

We got married within 5 weeks and on a budget. He was posted to Germany so there was no way we could have saved up enough for the October wedding we had planned for. This means I had to compromise on a LOT. I had my aunts dress, and although it was lovely, it simply wasn't 'me'.
We didn't have a photographer because we reckoned that everyone would have a camera and we would at least get a few good pictures. How wrong we were, and to this day I am gutted about that. It was a lovely day, a bit haphazard, but the people that mattered were there, and everyone pulled together to make it a special day.
If I had the chance to do it all over again I probably would wait to make it the kind of day I wanted, but it's done now.
What I am trying to say is that it can be done, and it can be lovely, just be prepared to compromise on a lot of the things you want.

If you do want to wait then there are a few other options available to you, but if you really can't wait to get wed and moved in, then it can be done. If you have family that will chip in with time that helps too. x

Magichands

I don't know Woodbridge myself, but I think that it is covered by this guide:

Wattisham Service Community Official Guide

I think that the HIVE at Woodbridge might have it in hard copy.

Ministry of Defence | Defence For... | The Service Community | HIVE Information Service | East Anglia | Woodbridge HIVE

thanks everyone. Now that I've had a good sleep and a few hours to think more about it I've realised that it doesn't really matter in the long run anyway. I've never wanted a 'big, showy' sort of wedding, just a small intimate family/close friends thing but I did have specific things that I wanted that I wont be able to organise in time. I think if we just do what we can now, then in the future we can always renew our vows and have it more how we wanted. I remember when I was working on a cruise ship years ago and a couple were renewing their vows on the bridge of the ship, at sunset, had close family/friends onboard who then went for a lovely private meal in the posh restaurant afterwards. It was so romantic and more the type of wedding that I wanted than the whole big church thing with flowers matching ushers waistcoats etc.

I went to Oxfams wedding dress section last year to get a cheap old wedding dress as fancy dress for a friends hen do. We thought they would be really hideous, so we'd dress the hen in that with some accessories. The dresses turned out to be really nice and obviously cheap, so that's always an option. Could always get a nice dress from Monsoon or Coast though for around £200. Maybe registry office (never been a big fan of having a church wedding for myself), hiring a room cheaply somewhere and taking our own buffet? We have some friends who are in a band, could get them to play for the reception.

Might not be so bad afterall

Sounds like a good old knees up to me!

I'd love to get married but both me and him have a fear of being in the spotlight and I have an aversion to camera's so it doesn't look too promising for us! I'd much rather have a small family wedding, possibly abroad and tie it in with our honeymoon (then the family who come can also babysit!) and then have a 'night do' when we get back.

I have been to Woodbridge - stayed in a lovely hotel there when working in Ipswich for a couple of weeks (Ufford Park Best Western Hotel) and it looked like a lovely town

You don't even have to have the buffet. We had a lovely sit down 3 course meal for £16 per head. They tried to charge us for the wedding meal (£35 per head) but I just opted for the Xmas menu, which luckily was beautiful. I told them that if they could fill their restaurant area with 35 people two weeks after Christmas and three days after new year then to go ahead.

They bit my hand off. Not literally, of course, and they came down on the cork-age too. If you barter, and don't take any of the "we'll charge an extra 30% because it has the word wedding in front of it" bullshit, you can get some really good deals.

oooh Ufford Park Hotel is lovely! my OH left Woodbridge in August last year after 3 years there, he didn't particularly like it as a posting but that was because he was unaccompanied for the 3 years he was there and after failing his para course because he broke ribs in training he then spent the next 2 years sat in the storeroom! the base itself looked pretty good though, the houses are all American style and pretty big - a lot better than the usual ones I can assure you! we stayed in the contact house a couple of times and the kitchen and garden was huge and the house itself was lovely. It's not a bad area, Tesco is about 15 - 20 mins drive away but it's a big Tesco, Ipswich is the nearest big shopping centre and a lot of the singlies were put up in brand new flats on the outskirts of Ipswich and paid a fab £500 for the inconvenience of it all due to there being a shortage of single accommodation on base! It's a nice part of the country and I wouldn't mind being posted back there accompanied but he says 'never again', such is life!

sounds like a nice place
Well the weddings not going to happen for a while now anyway. I was quite happy to just go for the cheaper option and do it before he gets posted but he wants to wait, save and 'do it properly', so looks like we'll be renting locally when he's down there, to begin with at least. We've got around nine months, so I can relax again (for now)

My "quickie wedding on the cheap" story (see my one loaded photo for a pic of the day):

With me being foreign, we had to be married for me to be here at all so the wedding couldn't be a year-long engagement or I'd be deported. We had 6 weeks to get it sorted. First thing is remember to allow for the public notice you need, either to get bans read at a church or for the notice to be in the registry office. That's important.

So: Registry office ceremony. I made a mix CD with my favorite classical pieces for the music (I used Canon in D and the flowers duet). Have a track for the entrance and a track for the writing of the register, and if you're feeling fancy, a track for leaving. There were exactly 7 people there who were not in or officiating the ceremony- my mom and step dad, his mom and dad, our two best friends, and the girlfriend of one of said friends. Everyone had a job: opening the door for us, filming the ceremony, etc.

I wore a blue formal gown that I now wear for black and white tie affairs, with a white feaux-fur wrap and some diamondy looking hair clips. The groom got a new suit for the occasion and got a blue shirt and tie to match me (he looked dead handsome). Our outfits cost less than £200 for both, and we got to keep them and wear them over again. We had temporary rings since we couldn't afford the ones we wanted, plain matching silver bands for the symbolism of them, £20 each.

For flowers, I got a single long stem rose and had it wrapped in ribbon. The two mothers each got a rose in a complimentary color, the groom and two dads got coordinating button holes. Total flower budget: less than £20.

The registry office had a photo room, and all us hip young 20 somethings like to think we know how to use a digital camera in exciting artistic ways, so that was our photography. So that was free.

For a reception: we booked in to a nice restaurant near the registry office that does designer cocktails (toblerone martini yum). We had what we wanted to eat and the place gave us a round of drinks on the house in honour of the day We had a single layer cake from a local bakery do a nice sponge decorated in white with a complimentary ribbon around the edge, and I borrowed my mom's cake topper from her wedding. Cake was cut, champagne was popped, toasts were made, and in honour of my American-ness, my parents got everybody tinkling their spoons on their glasses while we kissed. And that was it! Wedding and reception, easy peasy.

Here is the crucial thing to being satisfied with a 'tiny wedding'. You have to change how you think about the day- it ISN'T about showing off or even celebrating with everyone you know. Think of the people you really and truly love, the ones you'd have in the room while you were giving birth. Those are the people you invite, forget the rest. We aren't all celebs and royals, we can't all be married in cathedrals and party at castles with our closest 500 friends. Think about the weddings right up until the 1950's: back then, it was family and closest friends partying in the garden with homemade nibbles. It's about solemnizing a sacred commitment to someone you will be with forever, it's really quite an intimate thing. And that's all you need.

If you want to have the big wedding, then how about you have a small one this time and then have a "blessing" later on. Me and my Australian OH had always planned to have 2 "weddings" purely so that all of our family could share it with us, as a lot of my family can't afford (and wouldn't want) to go to Australia and same with this family! So we planned to have a massive church wedding here and then a beach/BBQ blessing/renewal of the vows there. As it turned out, his reg decided that seeing as we weren't married at the time (we were engaged already) they were going to post him to Scotland, and there was no way I was going to move all the way up there (from London), away from my job/family when I'd have to find a flat somewhere separately with no security. Then the reg decided that if we were married they'd post him to London as they knew that's where I was based, so we decided to hold them to that! So instead of a massive church wedding, we had a small registry office do with my family and our best friends there and at some point in the near future we'll get as many friends and family as we can to make the trek to Australia so we can have a massive party! It's not for everyone but for me it's more about the marriage than the wedding day anyway, I was never fussed about the "all eyes on me" bridezilla aspect to be honest, so it took some pressure off me!

that's pretty similar to what I was planning. I was thinking of just having a small registry office wedding, then going for a nice meal somewhere with the close friends/family who were at the wedding. Then on another evening hiring a room somewhere for a small party for more friends/family to join us. Then when we could afford it in the future to 'renew our vows' and have a 'nicer' wedding, hopefully abroad somewhere.

There's no rush now though as he's broken his humerous, so wont be finishing his training and getting posted for a long time as it takes a long time to heal.