My biggest concern on our wedding day was how to be in two places at once. As you may remember, we didn’t have access to our venue until 7am the morning of the wedding, and we didn’t have access to the church until 9:30am that morning (and the ceremony started at 3:30p!!) How was I going to decorate both venues AND get ready for you know.. getting married and all? I thought long and hard about all of this and realized that my Type-A personality was going to have to let go of a little control. I assembled a chief team of my favorite organized and decor-savvy friends (who weren’t already in the wedding) and made them my House Party. I chose these five people because I trusted them wholly and knew if something came up their judgement would know what to do. Thank you again Levi, Carissa, Sophie, Bridget, and Dom for all of your hard work :)

While I trusted them completely, some all of my decorations were a little confusing and therefore needed a little explaining. So I wrote a Wedding Day Decoration Instruction Manual. Totally normal right? Inside I broke down the venues starting with the Church followed by the Reception venue. I had previously sorted all of our decorations into numbered bins which were either labeled “Church” or “Reception”. These bins were inventoried so that I knew what exactly was in each bin, and they were delivered to each venue the night before. In my manual, each “area” (like sanctuary, sign-in table, cake table, bar, etc.) had a sheet like this:

It would list which bin everything is in, what the contents of that bin were, and some bossy instructions explaining where everything goes. And for the more visual people, I drew a little diagram for each area. So for example the church decorations had the following drawings:

Which translated to:

The church was easy. There were only two bins of decorations there. The reception venue on the other hand had the other eight bins. (eight!!!) It’s portion of instructions were just like the ones at the church listing out what each “area” required and which bin to find said decorations. Like so:

Along with a picture like this:

Which then translated to this:

I also included a few general pages for how to assemble several repeated items like our paper flower vases and signage.

Because the reception also had guest tables which were a whole other mess of things to keep in order. The interior designer in me decided to include a floor plan that had each table labeled by animal and paper flower wreath color. Each table had a bin with a smaller bin inside that was filled with the moss stone place cards of each person sitting at that table and each were labeled by animal. So if someone was supposed to sit at the squirrel table their place card was in the squirrel bin. Makes sense right? Here is that floor plan.

This page was followed by a detail of each table including where each place card would go. This was a little complicated because we had several vegetarians and children’s meals which meant that their place had to be marked somehow, so rather than color coding the place cards or something, I also gave this floor plan with details of each table to our caterer. They about died out of excitement for how easy I made their job that night :)

 I included a small photoshopped diagram of how each centerpiece should be setup with the wreathes, cake stands, and ceramic animals. Which I think translated beautifully.

I also wanted our black napkins to be folded into a bow shape with a gold napkin ring for the knot, so I included this handy little diagram for my house party to use when folding each napkin, along with where to place each place card.

This was obviously taken before the china arrived.

 Here are a few other special areas and how they translated.

Some people might look at all of this and think I’m absolutely crazy for going to this much trouble for my wedding decorations. But honestly, I received SO many compliments from my house party, day-of coordinator, caterer, and wedding party on how seamless everything went together. I only had to take a couple of calls while getting ready to answer a few simple questions. My coordinator also snapped a couple of photos of the decorating progress and texted them to me which was so sweet. In my mind it was totally worth it to be at ease that day and not have to think about anything except for marrying my best friend. I was able to enjoy time with my friends and family and that to me was all that mattered.

PS: If you want someone this OCD and detail oriented helping you out on your big day you can totally hire me. I would love to help you :)