our wedding day timeline
Making our wedding timeline was the most stressful and intimidating part of planning our wedding by ourselves. But as someone who’s had a career in project management for the last 7 years, I was prepared for the challenge and, surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad.
Here you can subscribe to unlock the google doc of the whole timeline and master info sheet I put together for our day-of coordinator. I essentially handed this as a book to her in a binder on our rehearsal day and she ran with it!
The hardest part is getting started and here’s my advice on where to begin!
Start with your rental time frame at the venue to give you a rough idea of the window you are working with in the space.
Choose your ceremony start time and build around that. We asked the venue when the perfect ceremony lighting was in the fall and built the rest of our timeline around that.
Use your vendors as a resource! Ask your vendors what their preferred set-up/break-down times are. It is intimidating when vendors ask for your timeline, but instead I flipped it on them and asked them first “what is your ideal time frame?”. This helped me build the timeline with their ideal work time in mind. In the same vein, ask your photographer for their ideal breakdowns of each category of photos — this helped a ton with building the timeline more specifically so it’s not just a block of time for “photos.”
Ex: If the invite is at 4:30PM and valet asks to set up 1.5 hours before invite time for them not to feel rushed — great, add them in at 3PM vendor load-in. Easy!
If you are planning by yourself and still need help, please reach out! I’d love to help be your virtual wedding planning buddy or just give any help or advice I can offer!
