The one where we got married!

Lauren and Josh
21st August 2021 | Barnsley Town Hall/Rigby Cafe & Lounge

Well hello! This Thrifty Bride is now a Thrifty Wife. Yep that’s right, we finally got married. After almost 14 years together, 2 and a half years being engaged and one postponed wedding we can finally say we’re Mr and Mrs. How bloody exciting is that?! I’ve been waiting to get our professional photos back before I came on here to share the many posts I have planned about our special day. Well the photos are back now so I hope you’re ready for some serious wedding spam.

I thought the best way to start would be just a general overview of the day with plenty of photos. Not too dissimilar to the other real weddings that have been featured on here. This post is just going to be a general overview of the day without a load of detail about specific things because I’ll be doing separate posts with more detail and I don’t want to repeat myself and bore you. This is more just to say we’re married and show off some photos. We got over 300 photos back from our photographer and there’s so many I want to share. Clearly though I cannot put that many photos into a blog post. We also had a photobooth at our reception and there is some absolutely hilarious photos from that too.

My current plan when it comes to sharing details and photos of our day is to write posts covering my dress, our car, what it was like having a small wedding, getting ready, the ceremony, the reception, the photo booth, a full budget breakdown and a post dedicated to my favourite photos. If I think of anything else I’ll be sure to write that up too. Alternatively if I’ve missed something off this list be sure to leave me a comment at the end of this post with what you’d like to see.

So now I’ve covered that you know what to expect over the next couple of months. I’m going to try and spread the posts out about my wedding in-between other bits of content so it’s not too heavily focused just on my day! Now let’s get into it!

Josh and I decided to stay together the night before our wedding. As you know, if you’ve been following our wedding journey, we ditched a lot of wedding traditions in favour of a day that was truly us. In the morning I didn’t feel too bad, I managed to have a decent breakfast and overall I felt very excited with just a few nerves. At around 10.00am my sister-in-law came to do my hair which is when Josh left and went to his dads. I got ready at home. That’s when I started to feel super nervous. My hair took quite a while as obviously my sister-in-law wanted it to look perfect and I was so happy with my hair, it was exactly what I wanted. Just as she’d finished my mum and her partner arrived. Not long after they left Josh’s mum popped round. No one stayed too long but it was nice to have people around so that I wasn’t on my own too much.

Around lunch time I figured I should make a start on my makeup. I chose to do my own makeup for several reason. To keep the cost down but mainly because I wanted to feel like myself and I don’t think I’m too shabby at makeup! I have absolutely no regrets about doing my own makeup at all because I was very pleased with it, but let me tell you it was so hard because my hands were shaking loads with nerves!

My dad and the photographer arrived at around the same time so I had a little chat with them and then carried on doing my makeup whilst the photographer got some photos of my dress and other bits. Shortly after my bridesmaid and her family arrived. As I only had one bridesmaid and she has a young family of her own she just got ready at her house. We spent some time talking and then it was time to get my dress on. I was actually ready super early which is so unusual for me because I’m one of those people who is late for absolutely everything. But the photographer wanted to be at our venue so he could get all the photos of our guests arriving but I wanted photos of my dad seeing me in my dress for the first time.

My dads reaction to my dress was perfect and it was worth being ready early so we could capture it. I loved my dress but I was also aware that it was a style that many people wouldn’t expect so I was unsure what everyone else would think. My dad said it was definitely worth the wait though and he loved it.

After that it was just a case of waiting around a little bit, feeding our cats (so glamourous) and then finally setting off to the venue. It actually forecast heavy rain on our wedding day and whilst there were some downpours throughout the day it actually stayed dry for all the important parts like walking to the town hall (some of our guests caught a little bit of rain but it stayed dry for me!) and photos outside after the ceremony so I couldn’t have asked for more!

There’s a whole post coming on the ceremony as I’ve a lot to share so I won’t go into too much detail here. It was a little different to what we expected thanks to Covid and a lot of stuff wasn’t actually communicated to us until the wedding day itself but at that point nothing mattered and our ceremony was still lovely.

It was quite a short ceremony, again thanks to Covid, but it got the job done and we were finally husband and wife! We weren’t allowed to stop for photos inside the building so all our photography was done outside which is why I’m really glad the rain held off. This is where we had all the formal photos done with group shots and photos of us. We’d told our photographer that we wanted more of a focus on natural, candid photos and we certainly got that! But this time after the ceremony also produced some of my favourite photos of the day and those family photos were important to us too.

Once all the group shots had been done we told people to start heading to our reception venue which was only about a 5 minute drive away from the registry office. This is when we had a bit of time to take some photos of just use two.

Once the photos were over we hopped in the car and headed to the reception ourselves. There’s a whole post coming on our wedding car with some photos because it was just the most perfect car for our wedding. We had Herbie and honestly there could not have been a better car to fit the style of our wedding! It was nice to just have that 5 minutes in the car by ourselves too to try and absorb everthing.

Again I won’t got into too much detail on the reception as there’s a whole post coming about it. But it was everything we could have hoped for and more. We wanted to create a really personal day and did pretty much everything for our wedding ourselves. Even though we’d set the reception venue up the night before it was nice to see it on the day with the cake out and the balloons and the fairy lights on and stuff. I couldn’t have been happier that we’d gone for really personal touches and without blowing my own trumpet I do think it made our wedding a lot more special for us and our guests too rather than using generic decorations or a theme you see quite often (we had a Disney Up theme!).

We had some time just mingling with our guests, enjoying a drink and letting people chat. Our photo booth was an immediate hit though and I’d say within the first 20 minutes people were flocking to it. We also got over 300 photos back from that and they’re absolutely hilarious. You can really see that people had fun with it and enjoyed it. It’s also hilarious to see the pictures getting funnier as the night went on!

After we’d done a bit of mingling we went off for 10 minutes to have some more photos on our own. Just after this the rain started again and it didn’t really stop all night but by that point it didn’t matter at all as we didn’t need to be outside anymore!

The only more formal and traditional parts to the reception were the speeches and the cake cutting. The speeches weren’t all that traditional though as me and the best man got up to play ‘never have I ever’ during the grooms speech! I absolutely love Josh for adding that into his speech and it was so funny!

After the speeches we cut the cake, well pretended to cut the cake as we actually had cupcakes for the guests and the cake was for us to take home! Then it was on to food and after that the party started! We actually only booked our photographer up to this point as we didn’t decide on a first dance until the very last minute so the only thing I’d change is booking the photographer for longer but I wouldn’t say I regret not doing it as I have nothing from the day I regret at all.

For our food we just had a buffet. We didn’t get married until 3pm and we didn’t want a wedding breakfast anyway. The formality just didn’t fit with us and our day so we scrapped it and served a buffet at around 6.30pm instead. After food the DJ started and we had a fun casino too that started at the same time. I’ll go into more detail on the reception post but the casino was also a massive hit with our guest. We had a first dance and I had a dance with my dad then it was full on party mode! We requested lots of 80s and 90s songs and all the traditional cheesy wedding disco songs and our DJ absolutely delivered. I don’t think the dancefloor was empty all night!

Everything wrapped up around 11pm and we said goodbye to all of our guests feeling beyond happy at being married and at how our day had gone. It was absolutely perfect for us. Fun, relaxed and personal which was precisely what we wanted.

I have left supplier info below even though a lot was done by us or family and friends (I have noted this too in the supplier list) and there will be a full budget breakdown on here soon.

For now that’s everything from the new Mr and Mrs Gill. See you soon with more wedding posts and more photos! Oh and don’t forget to let me know what else you’d like to see from our wedding in the comments!

Suppliers

Ceremony venue – Barnsley Town Hall
Reception venue – Rigby Cafe and Lounge
Photographer – Paul Walker Photography
Dress – Wed2b (Libby by Viva Bride though it’s no longer available)
Brides shoes – New Look
Grooms suit and shoes – Next
Ties – Ties R Us in Rose Gold
Car – Love Me Do Wedding Cars
Bouquets and buttonholes – made my my mums partner using flowers from The Range, eBay and Aliexpress
Rings – brides from H Samuel and grooms from Etsy
Bridesmaid dress- found on Facebook marketplace new with tags
Hair – done by my sister-in-law
Makeup – done by myself