9 Months Until the Wedding

I've recently been trying to bring the blog back to life and figured all of this wedding prep and planning could make for some good content as I get things going again.

It's crazy to think I've been engaged for more than five months already. It feels like it was just yesterday that Chris got down on one knee and we were busy celebrating with family and friends for days. In the past five months that have already flown by, we've slowly started cracking away at our to-do list. Read on below to see what we've checked off so far:

Visited and booked our venue

I've never been that girl who has her dream wedding planned and just needs to insert a guy into the picture. But as soon as it sunk in that I was engaged, I already knew we'd be getting married somewhere on the central coast. I scoured the web and used sites like Gatherologie to start a list of my favorite wedding venues in the area. Top choices included: The Casitas Estate, The Grace Maralyn, Cass House and The Gardens at Peacock Farms

I highly recommend booking appointments to visit the venues. As beautiful as the pictures were, it was so helpful to be able to walk through each location and see how everything flowed and would fit together. Make sure to come prepared with questions that are important to you and your big day and have a notebook handy to jot things down as well.

Tried on and said 'Yes!' to my dress

Going back to my previous statement of never really having my wedding pre-planned or envisioned, I did have a few things in mind when starting my dress hunt: lace, fitted, open back

Because I have some fun photos to share from the process, I'll be writing more about the dress shopping and fitting process in a separate post -- check back soon!

Booked our photographer and took engagement photos

Photographer and venue were the two things I knew I needed to book first. I'm glad I started contacting photographers early on because I honestly didn't think about how far out in advance they'd be booked (how naive of me, I know). To my dismay, a few of the photographers I was interested in sent back the "I'd love to but am already booked on that date..." emails but then I lucked out and was referred to our wonderful photographer, Amber McGaughey. 

She was a joy over email from the start and even sweeter in person when we took our engagement photos. Check out the reel below for a few more from our engagement session: