Wedding Series | Engagement Party Planning

Engagement party planning is the fun bit before all the stress comes. Its the perfect excuse to get your nearest and dearest together and celebrate your up coming nuptials.

I also know many people who have decided against having them as they haven't wanted one, or they are getting married quicker. As we had decided to wait two years in order to save for the wedding and a house, we wanted to celebrate!

The venue is the big decider for this, as it will be what costs the money if anything.
We decided to have ours where we first met, given that we got engaged abroad, we couldn't really have it where he popped the question!

Luckily for us, the place we first met is just up the road from where we live, and is one of our local pubs.

They have a lovely function room out the back of the pub that also has access to the garden (of which a section was also reserved for us)

The function room was also free, which was a massive bonus, especially when you are saving for the wedding and in our case a house too. I would definitely recommend trying to find somewhere cheap or free if you can. If you don't have any pubs nearby that offer this, try village halls or even church halls.

We also decided against food, to keep the costs down, which I slightly regret as I was starving as I couldn't eat before hand as was too nervous!
However, the pub serves really nice bar food, (the cajun fries are to die for!) so people had the option to either eat before they came, or to order something once they arrived so I didn't feel bad on them - you have to think of money unfortunately. If you are lucky enough to have budget for food too, then obviously crack on, but we didn't, and no one minded.

If you are local to Tunbridge Wells, you will probably have heard of St John's Yard. If not, and you live close by I would definitely recommend it for functions (I also had my 30th birthday party there) but also if you just want a drink with friends. On Sunday's they also do a burger deal where they have a selection of burgers half price and they are a-m-a-z-i-n-g!
They have also recently opened another restaurant next door to them, The Shuffle House, which serves pizza and tapas, with a bar upstairs that has shuffle boards that you can hire to play on. I believe they can also do functions here.

I love St John's Yard as the atmosphere is always great, the decor is quirky, the staff are friendly, and the garden is lovely especially in the summer, but also has heaters in the colder months.

The room is decorated really well with cute bunting and fairy lights hanging up as well as the quirky pub decor already, so we only added some balloons and a board of pictures with fairy lights that I made up the week before. This meant minimal effort from us, meaning we could enjoy the day without rushing around to decorate and didn't have to worry about clearing the decorations before we left that night or go back the next day.

Everyone commented on how lovely the function room was, even if we were a bit squished in. This was mainly due to the fact we presumed a lot of people wouldn't be able to make it and then were blown away with the turn out!

We were so surprised with the turn out and it gave us an insight of what the wedding day would be like as we spent the whole night saying hello to people and thanking for them for coming before we'd have to move on to the next person.
It was very overwhelming, as well as a lot of fun, but we barely saw each other. So we have made the decision to ensure that on our wedding day, we schedule time out of the day for just us. It's our wedding day, and yes, we want to spend the day celebrating with our family and friends, but we also want to be able to celebrate together.

Much Love as always,

237 days and counting... 🧡💒💜

You're engaged! Now What? | Wedding Series

Firstly, Congratulations!

Getting engaged is, for most people, the best day/night of their lives. It is exciting, new and amazing...

Then you realise you have a wedding to plan.

What do you do first? Where do you start?

This is completely normal! I don't think that any bride could honestly say they didn't have any of these thoughts.

I definitely got excited and we sorted out who we wanted for our wedding party before we had even come home from Turkey!

We knew we wanted to give ourselves two years, to save for the wedding as well as to save to buy a house... crazy I know.
We also wanted it to be as close to our engagement date as possible.

Firstly, I would definitely advise to get a notebook to write down all of your ideas to keep them somewhere altogether.
(some lovely ones here)

I also have spreadsheets helping me plan, because I am that way inclined, and I like that I can work on multiple tabs easily.

I also downloaded an app called Hitched early on, which has been great to give me an idea of what needs to be done and when. (This is super useful and something I would definitely recommend!)

A word of advice is to go at your own speed.

Don't rush ahead with planning to please other people. If you don't want to get married for 5 years, then don't!

Plan what you want, when you want, with who you want!

I have a whole series coming up of how I have planned my wedding. All of them will feature my opinions and have no bearing on how exactly any of you should do it yourselves, just to try and help if I can!

Much Love,

PT journey so far.

So a few months ago I tried on my bridesmaid dress for the first time for my beautiful friends wedding.

It didn’t do up...

Not a massive surprise as I have been overweight for a while now, plus my boobs are insanely huge!

Something clicked in me and I decided I didn’t want to have the dress taken out or get a bigger size and so I contacted a family friends as I knew her husband was a PT locally.

A lot of people see it as an added expense when you could do it yourself, but I needed someone to push me. Also, I suffer with hyper mobility and didn’t want to cause myself any injuries!

After speaking to my friend and then to him we decided to meet up to get an idea of what I wanted from my sessions.
This was one of the scariest days of my life as it was so new to me. To be in a gym at all was new territory for me, let alone with a personal trainer, but Kaedyn put me at ease straight away.

We decided on two sessions a week and booked my first one in for a few days later.

Now... having danced a lot when I was younger I didn’t think I was completely unfit, just carrying extra weight.

Boy was I wrong! My first session was hideous... he started with a cardio fitness session so he could assess where I was at... it appears... I was super unfit! I even cried on him... bless him.

Fast forward a few months and it’s slow but steady which is what I wanted.

Here’s my progress pictures wearing the dress...

The wedding was the weekend just gone and although I eventually did need a bit of work on my dress, that was due to my boobage as although they have gone down in size they are still bigger than average, but the dress did do up! Woop woop!

I’m still going strong and I have been taking full progress pictures throughout to keep me going and will update you further down the line for sure.

Have you ever used a personal trainer? What have been your experiences?


Much love

T xx

What I've been up to.

So there's been some media silence from me, mainly on here as I've had a very busy few months and haven't had much head space for blogging which is really sad as I enjoy it so much. But now I'm back!

I've helped plan a hen do and a baby shower, which take up a lot of time. The outcomes of both were great fun and everyone seemed to really enjoy them.

We went on holiday to Turkey with my Grandma, which was out first holiday abroad together and was amazing. I've been going to Turkey with my Grandma for nearly 13 years now and love it out there so it was really important to me that Jack enjoyed it too, luckily he did! phew!

We've also been to two of our friends wedding which were amazing days. We got to see a lot of our friends who we hadn't managed to in a long time and was great to catch up.

We've had many nights in, and a few nights out. I've had a lot of bad days, but also good days. I'm getting there.

 



I've been having a lot of cuddles with my two girls, which are complete time wasters, but completely gorgeous.

Plus we've moved house!  Check out my moving vlog.

This week is going to be a week of blog posts, one every night. I'm very excited, and can't wait for you guys to have a read.

I'm also going to be filming some videos this week, including a review of the new Body shop face masks and Jack doing my make up which I think is going to be hilarious!

Much Love,

T xx