I woke up this morning like wait a second, we’re more than halfway through January. January what?? 2020???! AHHH!

I have a sweet sweet friend (and bridesmaid!!) who always reminds me to the day how many months away from our wedding we are. This same friend, 12:10am, texted me “HAPPY WEDDING YEAR!!!” *champagne emoji* 🙂 She is the sweetest and also so right. Holy cannoli.

I mean holy cow…It’s our wedding year!!

I’m not going to lie to you, the number one thing on my mind right now is the $$$. We seriously seriously goofed by thinking 2 years would be fine to budget with. Thinking that wasn’t the goof – but waiting to pay for a lot of things til 5 months before was the goof. Then that year and a half behind us means nothing…Learn from my mistakes, friend.

But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about happy things!! Like how things are coming together!! And how the fog has lifted and the vision is clear!

I realized a couple weeks ago I had never shared our wedding mood board with y’all and I don’t know WHY it’s taken me this long because I’m so psyched about it!!

Ashley our amazing angel planner sent straight from heaven put together this mood board on Aisle Planner for us based off of our talks and my pinterest board and let me TELL YOU I want to live inside of it forever.

First off, here’s my super messy pinterest board so you can get a feel for what we’re feelin’: 

P.S. click here to follow me so you can see all my wedding things and I can see yours!

It’s messy because the first like 20 pins I really didn’t know what I wanted. I was just pinning pretty things. There’s a lot of green in there, not sure why.

Then I tried to separate a mood board with things that were not specifically wedding related. That helped even us out quite a bit!! 

From there, Ashley created two different styles and palettes for us to choose from. We ended up with the Palm Springs: Desert Sunset one (surprised??)!

I want my whole house to be painted in this color palette oh my word!!

The overall color scheme was created from this photo we found on Pinterest. It’s linked to an old/bad Etsy link so I have no idea who to credit:

From this we chose our linen colors, our invites are on deck (MORE ABOUT THAT LATER I’m so stoked about invites), etc. etc. Trust me when I say having this palette and these ideas have helped me visualize my whole day so much better.

So here’s all the things that are upcoming for us and a little rewind to see where we’ve been!

(Mainly for my own benefit to be like yes Holly you have accomplished some things)

What we’ve accomplished:

• Decided on a looong sweet engagement 
  • (no regrets there, pal! I have love love loved being AJ’s fiance)
• Figured out how to budget 
  • (Yes I remember how I just told you it backfired…still decided on that budget though, right??)
• The most beautiful dreamy venue!! 
  • (p.s. We’re totally moving in afterwords – hope that’s okay Vickie?!!)
• The most delicious caterer of AJ’s dreams 
  • (I dream of those fried mac n cheese balls at night…)
• Save the dates 
  • (which btw should always be on postcards from now until forever!)
• Picked our bestie photographer 
  • (WHO IS NOW ENGAGED HERSELF WHAT!!)
• Dragged said bestie photographer up to Washington D.C. and took the most beautiful engagement photos…! (Paige, let’s do it again okay??) 
• Found the wedding dress of my dreeeeams!
• Learned some tough lessons along the way 
  • (knew we would, but didn’t know what or how tough)

Not bad for the first year and a half of wedding planning right?? 🙂 

What’s Up Next:

• Cake & Desserts (finding good gluten free desserts is hard, but ladies and gentlemen I think we’ve done it!!)
• Invitations (Like I said, especially stoked to share about this one…!)
• Dress Alterations (I picked it up in December and I’m SO EXCITED ABOUT IT!! I wish I could share everything about my dress with y’all but it’s super important that AJ is totally blindsided – there’s only so many surprises you can have after almost 9 years 🙂 – so I’m keeping it under wraps.)
• UM SURPRISE we hired a videographer – more on that soon too!
• Picking out wedding bands (we just casually left that out of the budget because why not just add a surprise 2k expense to keep things SPICY) 
• 1000 more things but I’ll keep this list on the short side!

I’m so stinkin’ grateful that I’ve had y’all along for this journey! Real talk, when I started Let’s Cut the Cake I was pretty sure like zero people would be interested in our wedding plans and it would just be a good archive for me…!

But my heart gets so happy hearing from y’all and knowing you’re here along for the ride!!

Tell me, what would you like to hear about next? Is there anything I haven’t shared you’re curious about? I’m an open book!!

Til next week…!