My Inexpensive Wedding

First we had to find a place to get married in. Neither one of us was affiliated with any kind of church, so we had to do something else. We found out that we could have our wedding in the Mall Of America. Yes, I said the Mall Of America. They have a wedding chapel in there. It's called, "Chapel Of Love." We went down and checked everything out. We found out that for $500, we could have a wedding for 30 guests, a priest, the Unity Candle, and music. We figured we could afford that. We'd just have everyone at the reception.

Since we were just having a small wedding, we didn't need a bunch of flowers or anything like that. I bought some silk flowers at Michael's and made my bouquet. Easy as pie! I couldn't afford a spectacular dress, so that was going to be a problem. I thought it was going to be the biggest problem. It wasn't. Someone I worked with at the time had a daughter, about my size, that had two different dresses from two different weddings. She let me borrow one. I didn't have to have it tailored in any way. It was like the dress was waiting for me. The dress didn't have a veil, so I had to go to a consignment shop for that. I found one for $50. It was a perfect match for the dress. Pretty unbelievable huh? As for the rings, I was working at Montgomery Wards at the time. They were in the process of closing, so everything was deeply discounted. We got my engagement ring, my wedding band, and my husband's band, in white gold, for $300. And we're not talking about cheap rings either. My engagement ring has a round cut, 1/4 carat diamond in it, and my wedding band has 3 diamond chips in it.

My mother-in-law is a commercial artist. We had her make our invitations for us. We designed them, she made them. I bought paper that looked like papyrus, because we were going with an Egyptian theme for the invitations. The stationery with the envelopes was $20. They turned out great!

Now, for the photography. Both my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law were big fans of photography. My mother-in-law did some research on-line about the poses professional photographers use, and she took all our pictures. No paying for photos.

Grand total so far: $870.

Now my husband. He doesn't wear a suit for anything. I wasn't going to force him to wear a tuxedo. You know what he did? He bought a brand new pair of black jeans, went to Ragstock, purchased a white dress shirt, a leather vest, a cumberbund, and a black suit coat. Grand total: $50. As you can see from the picture, we both looked very nice.

I know you're wondering by now what we did for the reception. I'm going to tell you right now.

We checked around for places we could rent for the evening. We found out those were very expensive. We were getting quotes from $800 all the way up to $2000. We were pretty upset about the pricing, but, we wanted to include all our closest friends, so we were going to pay the price. We didn't have to.

My cousin had a new, fairly large house, built up in Andover. She volunteered it for our reception. We got Subway Sandwiches for food, and one of my husband's old roommates knew someone who owned a liquor store. We told everyone that they had to BYOB if they wanted something other than beer, but we did have mix available. We got two kegs of beer, and every kind of mixing soda you could think of, for $150. Okay, we didn't have a cake, but we were on TV that night, so everyone who didn't get to go to the wedding got to watch it afterwards. Why were we on TV? A local news station was doing a feature on the "Chapel Of Love", and we were the only couple getting married that night.

So there you have it, a nice wedding, a reception for all our friends and family, and all for less than $1500.