Once you finish securing all of your vendors, then the next step is the fun part – decorating! These are all the little personal touches that make your wedding unique to you. While Pinterest is a great place to start in finding inspiration, when I was planning my wedding, I never found a really complete checklist for all the different types of decor to consider.

Here is my checklist to help you with all your decor planning needs:

Ceremony

Flowers

Flowers are an easy way to make your wedding unique. From the type of flowers to the colors you choose, flowers can really fill out the space quickly and easily. Unfortunately, flowers can significantly add to your budget. It is important to figure out what might fit within your budget and stick to it. If you are keeping with tradition, you might consider bouquets for the bride and bridesmaids, boutonnieres for the groom and groomsmen, and flower petals for your flower girl. Some people choose to have small arrangements on the ends of each row or larger pieces to frame the altar.

At the end of the day, flowers look beautiful during your wedding, but they are short lived. You can press flowers to save the memory, but the majority of them are only temporary. I have seen other brides use silk flowers or wood flowers to save on money and to have a keepsake that lasts forever. For our wedding, we had two ceremonies so we recycled our bouquets and my husband’s boutonniere. It allowed us to save some money by getting to use the flowers twice. You can also offer your flowers up to your guests as a thank you gift for coming. Our florist also donated the majority of our flowers to a local senior center so they could enjoy them.

Programs

Programs are certainly not necessary, but people do find them useful if they are not familiar with the people in your wedding party. It also allows them to follow along with the order of the ceremony. Be sure to include the names of whomever is doing readings or prayers. Additionally, it can be a place to give thanks and acknowledge your parents. We had fun with our wedding program and gave our guests little puzzles and trivia they could complete while they waited for the wedding ceremony to start. If you are having a hot day, programs can also double as fans to keep your guests comfortable.

I just created ours using Canva and then had it printed through Shutterfly. Shutterfly always has good promos going on so you can 100 programs printed for fairly cheap.

Unity ceremony

Again, any type of unity ceremony is not necessary, but it can be something fun to add to make your ceremony special to you. I have heard of people doing sand ceremonies, lighting a unity candles, to doing a Celtic handfasting ceremony. Because I have two stepchildren, we opted for a glass unity ceremony to represent us all coming together as a family unit.

I found this amazing company called Unity in Glass, which I recommend to anyone looking into doing a unity ceremony. They first send you little pieces of glass in the colors of your choice. At your ceremony, you combine them together just like you would a sand ceremony. You later send them back in a prepaid package and they will blow the glass into whatever design you choose. We chose to have our glass blown into a Christmas ornament that we get to bring out each year and remember that moment at our wedding.

In terms of a wedding checklist, if you opt to do a unity ceremony of any kind, make sure you include the appropriate vases or containers that you might need. If you are doing a handfasting ceremony or blessing of the rings, make sure you bring whatever equipment necessary.

Ring box

You want to consider having a ring box to carry your rings in and make sure they don’t get lost. Additionally, you can use the box in close-up photos of your rings. We just bought this cheap ring box, which I have used since multiple times for travel. Bonus is that they come in a bunch of different colors to suit your wedding’s color scheme.

Readings

Another thing to consider for your ceremony is if you plan to do any readings. Make sure you either have your readings printed neatly for your readers or, if they are reading from a book, have their potion noted with a sticky note. Our children chose to read passages from some of their favorite books. Just be sure to remember to pack whatever you need for your readings. For some inspiration, here is one of our readings from Pete the Cat’s “Groovy Guide to Love“:

“May the sun shine all day long, everything go right and nothing wrong. May those you love bring love back to you and may all the wishes you wish come true!”

Irish Blessing

Hot Tip: As someone whose husband read his vows off his phone, I recommend remembering to print your vows too. Even he agreed after that it looked better in photos to be reading from a piece of paper.

Reception

Welcome Sign

We opted not to have a welcome sign, but many people choose to have this as a way to welcome their guests. It might make more sense if you are at a venue where they might be multiple weddings going on at one time so people know they are at the right one. Check with your venue though to see if they can do anything special. We got married at a resort that put our names up on their marquee at the main gate. As a great way to save money, I have seen people use markers on an old mirror they found at a thrift store.

Seating Chart

When I first started planning our wedding, I was a firm believer in people just sitting wherever. I didn’t want to deal with figuring out who should sit next to whom; I just wanted everyone to sit down, eat, and have fun.

My wedding coordinator however strongly urged me to have a seating chart. She told me that people come to weddings and expect to be told where to go. People have generally been to a wedding or two so they know the drill to find their name and then find their seat. It simplifies things to quickly create a guest seating chart.

These don’t need to be fancy. Pinterest can give you a lot of inspiration. Some of my favorites are people that write out names on an old window. We opted to take one of those collage picture frames and I just printed names on pieces of paper to fill the frames. I also added a picture from our engagement photos to show off. It was quick, simple, and honestly took less than 15 minutes to put together.

Table Numbers

If you are having a seating chart, then you need to mark your tables somehow so your guests know where to go. A simple way to do this is to buy frames from the dollar store and print large numbers to put in them. If you want something more creative, I have seen people use their engagement photos with numbers on them. My favorite are not even numbers at all, but instead labeling tables by something meaningful to the couple like their favorite places to travel or their favorite restaurants.

I suggest asking your coordinator or florist to see if they have anything you could rent. You will likely never need these again, so it is important to not spend a lot of your budget on these. Many people resell table numbers on Facebook marketplace so be sure to check that out as well.

Centerpieces

Centerpieces are nice ways to pull together your tables and not make them look so empty. Many people (including myself) just opt for a nice flower arrangement to stick with a color theme. These don’t need to be major though. I once coordinated a wedding that used beautiful glass vases and simple wildflowers.

The best wedding decor are items that you can reuse though. For our rehearsal dinner, we used cheap lanterns that we found online. We used these lanterns throughout our house after our wedding and gave them out to others as gifts. Some people who choose to have themed weddings might use their centerpieces to show off small items related to their theme. For example, if you are doing a travel themed wedding, you could incorporate maps into your centerpieces.

Guestbook

Many people choose to have a guestbook to remember all the people that attended their wedding. It is easy to just grab a book for people to sign, but I find it rare that people actually ever go look at these again. I would try going for something a little more unique that you could appreciate more frequently.

For our guest book, I found a nice sign that reads “Be Our Guest” that everyone signed with sharpies. It now hangs in our living room for all our guests to look at when they come visit.

Card Box & Gift Table

We used Amazon Registry for our wedding gifts. I knew most people bought things from there so I didn’t anticipate anyone really bringing anything to our wedding. My coordinator advised me again, however, that people will bring cards. People don’t like to show up to a wedding empty handed, so it is important to have a designated spot for where they could drop their cards.

You can easily design and decorate your own, but I find it important to use items that you can reuse as home decor after your wedding. We opted for this glass terrarium that I used chalk markers to write “Cards” on it. It beautifully fit in with the rest of our wedding decor and has been simple enough to add at home.

Photos

If you read my “I’m Engaged! Now What?” post, you know that I recommend finding a photographer that offers engagement photos as part of their package. Besides the benefit of getting to know your photographer, you will now have tons of engagement photos you can use as decor at your wedding. You can use your photos as part of your welcome sign, your table numbers, on your gift table – the possibilities are seriously endless.

You might also want to consider having a memory table with photos of loved ones that couldn’t be there for the day. It is a great way to honor them and share some photos that are deeply personal to you. My mom passed away before I got married, so I loved getting to pick photos of her to include on our wedding day.

Food Signs

These aren’t always needed, but you are doing a buffet of any kind it is great to help your guests know what they are getting. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where our weddings are known for having a cookie table. This is a table where friends and family bake a million different kinds of cookies for guests to eat at the wedding and then take home with them. Having food signs helped me label what each cookie was and most importantly label any that might contain nuts to alert those with allergies.

Lighting

Assuming you have a wedding that goes into the late hours of the night, it is important to consider lighting for when things get dark. Candles are great to add to the tables for low lighting. For the dance floor, our DJ provided us with some uplighting as part of our package. I recommend asking what they might be able to provide as these can sometimes match the colors of your wedding.

At our wedding, we had a big dance floor with some low ceilings that caused it to get a little dark at night. Our wedding photographer recommended adding some twinkle lights to brighten things up and add some dimension to our wedding photos. I am so glad she did, because this ended up being some of my favorite decor from the night. We ended up buying a few curtain string lights to hang behind the dance floor, which created an awesome, yet cheat background for dancing. As a bonus, we have since used these curtain lights to decorate my teen daughter’s room and put up at Christmas time.

Optional

Menus

One item that I would consider to be optional is creating a menu for your dinner. These work best if you are having a sit down meal, but it is likely that everyone has already needed to preselect their meal anyways. Therefore, I personally find that menus just get thrown away and I much rather spend money on something else. They do help complete table seatings though and guests will refer to them the moment they sit down.

Wedding Favors

Another item many people are doing away with are favors. The price of wedding favors add up quickly and most of the time people forget to take them. My guests enjoyed getting to take cookies with them after our wedding and still talk about that to this day.

Welcome Bags

Since we hosted a destination wedding, we chose to offer welcome bags instead of any type of favor. When they arrived, we delivered bags that they could take with them to the beach. Inside of the bag were basic things likes sunglasses, snacks, and water bottles. We were also sure to include a sort of “program of events” handout that outlined when and where our welcome dinner would be and what time the wedding would start. Since all of our guests were from out of town, we also recommended local restaurants and places to explore. These worked as a great alternative to generic wedding favors.

Hanger for Dress

During photos, your photographer will likely want to get a shot of your dress hanging before you even put it on. Make sure you have a nice wooden hanger to use instead of a bent wire one or a plastic one in a crazy color. A nice hanger isn’t 100% needed, but they are cheap and easy to upgrade. If you are looking for a gift for a bride, you could get them a nice one with their new name on it which would look awesome in pictures.

I hope this checklist gives you a complete overview of all the things you could consider for your wedding. The most important thing though is to do whatever makes you happy! While there are wedding traditions, there is no right or wrong way to have a wedding. All of these are merely suggestions and you should find what works towards creating the wedding of your dreams!

Wedding Photography Credit: Asheville Wedding Photography

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