Thursday, June 23, 2011

Wedding ... guest list

The very first thing we all started working on was the guest list.
Bucky requested from his family their list
and we began working on ours.

Coming up with the guest list is not as easy as many might think. The venue that Jacquelyn and Bucky had picked out for the reception limited us on how many we could invite. So we went by the rule of besides close family and their close friends, you had to have known the bride or groom a
long time and / or played a significant part in their life.

And since the wedding was out of state, we just didn't know how many people
would be willling / able to travel.
The venue could hold 150 but would be tight
and 125 to be comfortable.
We ended up inviting 155 and 122 traveled to the beach.
It's hard to even explain how much that meant to us that people
traveled out of town to share this day!

One of the best things we did was to make up a master list of guest in an Excel spreadsheet.
We had a column for name and address, number of guest from that household, whether invited to the engagement party, wedding, invitation, table assignment and relationship to the bride and groom. 
This list became our main wedding reference sheet. We used this over and over again and really depended on it.
below is our sheet so marked up! but that shows how much we really used it. I have blurred out addresses for privacy.
we also printed up several....like after the engagement party, I then deleted that column.


and my wedding tip .... make one of these! seriously...it was one of the best things we did to stay organized!

later.....

1 comment:

Tina Pollard said...

Great idea! I use excel spreadsheets for everything! About 7 years ago I set up our budget in excel and to this day we still use it. There are tabs at the bottom for each month and we can now go back and see how far we've come since we started. Also, we'd forget to pay someone if we didn't stay organized. Good job on this!