Question to me, from me: WHY is this so hard to explain? The video I posted took me 7 tries to finally spit everything out. I’ve had these ideas in my head for weeks and I’m just now sharing it with you! 

Probably because with events like this, I am totally disorganized. Good news: I have the most amazing planner for the big wedding day, so no need to worry. 

Okay: First a disclaimer! To prevent further confusion with all the wedding planning, we have named the two events:

Big wedding, and Lil wedding.

Lil Wedding is happening May 16th, it’s our sort of “elopement” and while it’ll be official, it will be lil. 

Big wedding is the further wedding date, where we will celebrate with all our friends and family. We’ll have our amazing vendor team, be out in Fredericksburg, it’ll be a blast.

The decision to elope

I’m not even sure if that’s what you should call our May 16th plans, because we are still 100% planning on having a “wedding day” in the near future! But this plan came about because of just how murky that future is.

Nothing is for certain right now. It seems like unless a big change comes it will still be dangerous for us to gather in wedding-size parties for a long time. 

With that being on the horizon, we knew if we were already “married”, it would be less of a blow if we did have to postpone our wedding argain.

On a happier note: May 16th 2020 is our nine year anniversary of being together! Nine years is SO LONG – I sometimes think of our relationship as being a child and that means it would be going into third grade. That’s kind of insane. 

More than anything we wanted to keep this day ours. It’s our marker for where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. 

That’s how we came about copy-ing and pasting our original plans to our new Big Wedding date, and creating this Lil Wedding just for us.

The Logistics

Marriage License

The very most annoying thing has been obtaining a marriage license. The county clerks office has been closed, reopened, closed again. Every page on their website has a close but similar date. We’ve shown up and got turned away twice. 

In Travis county they were only making appointments for emergencies, which we definitely are not. The second time we showed up we were told to make an appointment, and we got one right at the edge of the required 3 day waiting period! 

So – we don’t have it in our hands yet but it’s looking like that will work out! 🙂

Location

Obviously, Fredericksburg was out of the equation. But this gave us the opportunity to be in our hometown and get creative!  

We didn’t want a backyard wedding, so AJ came up with this great idea to find a rooftop parking garage! Stay with me here.

Austin has a beautiful skyline that we love and want to highlight. A parking garage is an abandoned space without the potential to get crowded like a park or a greenbelt. It’s a big enough space that we can all social distance from each other with ease. 

And the place where we got engaged has a parking garage right next to it. So it can also be sentimental. 

The Plan

So we will have our ceremony set up (more on that in a second). Everyone will bring their own table and chairs to set up in the “reception” part of the lot. 

After the ceremony (my brother is officiating!) we’ll all sit at our respective tables and have dinner together! We decided on Juliet, an italian restaurant in Austin that we looove and will be the perfect for all our anniversary dinners from here on out 🙂 

On to the fun stuff!

Pssst…I created a new board for this! Come be Pin pals with me!

For the ceremony, I’m going to construct a copper arbor out of pipes. Really clean and simple (and cheap!) to have something to stand under!

A predicament I came to about how we would all have to stand apart during the ceremony was my brother not standing in between us. So to not add to all the space that will be around us, I decided to make a backdrop to fill the back of the arbor!

Something colorful to brighten up the parking lot. And something full of texture to distract from how far apart we all are!

I have always been in love with these streamer, piñata backdrops. I have no idea what they’re called! But they’re fluffy and colorful and amazing!

They are also crazy expensive for what they are. They probably are time and labor intensive but most of them are made from flagging tape or plastic tablecloths! So I’ll be DIY-ing it 🙂

Our Outfits

I’m going to wear a colorful non wedding dress. I want to save my dress for our Big Wedding when AJ is in a tux too! AJ still doesn’t want to see it or else I would show you a photo. But it’s a nice, semi casual/formal pastel dress with some white in it. I’m so excited to wear it, and to get to wear it with these sweet memories attached to it after!

I think that’s one thing I would change about wedding dresses! You have so many memories become associated with it and they’re so beautiful…but then it sits upstairs in your attic all folded up forever! So there’s a silver lining to me wearing a non-wedding dress: I’ll get to wear it again and again!

Also – if I were more brave I would 100% wear a floral, colorful wedding dress…but I’m not! And I also love white so much, it’s my favorite color to wear.

The Photos

Like I said before, we are saving our vendors’ valuable time (and keeping them safe!) for their Big Wedding, so we are on our own for photos! Luckily, we have back up cameras and lots of tripods. So we will be taking our own photos! I’m kind of stoked for this opportunity!!! To document it all through our own eyes. It’s going to be special!

I will probably volunteer some of my family members to take photos of us with the settings all done and everything. Tripod photos limit creativity so much! I’m also excited to see how those photos turn out…!

I just heard!

Long story – but we are on the hunt for a new baker for our Big Wedding. I just found out from our planner that we can get our “tastings” delivered on our Lil Wedding day! So we can have them like our cake! AHH! It’s going to be so sweet!

That’s all for now friends! I can’t wait to share more with you as I tackle all of these things this week!

If we’re not friends over on Instagram – that’s where we should hang out! I’ll be sharing all the updates on my DIY’s and how everything turns out!