Scale down and wed up
Jul 26th, 2009 by Jeff
My fiancee and I were doing our bi-yearly household purge last month in which we clean out all the clothes, tools, pieces of furniture and any general crap that simply collects dust in our house and give it all to charity or recycle it, if possible.
This always makes me feel good, but completely for the wrong reason. I enjoy the feeling of having less stuff and coming home to less clutter. I’m sure some psychologist or feng shui expert has a rational explanation for this, but I digress. The great end result of this activity is that a charity can make some money off reselling our stuff to people who will actually use it, which is IMHO the best way to recycle.
Fast forward a few weeks later and we’re discussing what to do for our wedding guests when they arrive at their hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (that’s where we’re having a destination wedding). We were thinking out loud about giving our guests welcome bags that contain area maps, cute little shot glasses and some other fun trinkets when my fiancee stopped and asked “Will anyone actually use all this stuff? To which we both replied, “Not really. It will probably end up in a landfill somewhere.”
So now before we make any expenditures for our wedding, we first ask ourselves “Is this really necessary?” Of course, some things are definitely an extravagance, and that’s okay (what’s a wedding without a few extravagances … it’s one of those rare occasions where you can spoil yourself without apologizing). However, simply by stopping and thinking about the utility of each and every item has made us very aware of what’s important and what’s really unnecessary. Try it out yourself and see if it helps you “declutter” your wedding planning.
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I’d like to give a shout out to a great website called BrideShare, which lets brides network for the purpose of sharing the expense for wedding items as well as share and resell used wedding items. It’s a great way to save money and the environment. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that our online wedding planner
just got a new facelift, making it easier for brides to use and manage their details.
