While doing all of this I went through everything in our mountain of wedding projects and separated it into what was for the actual wedding on Maui and what was for the reception at home. Doing this I was able to see how much we still had to do, needed to buy and how much we needed to take with us to Maui for the wedding. I was pretty excited to really be able to see how little there was left to do. There really is a light at the end of the DIY wedding projects tunnel! Plus, we had so much less than I thought to take with us for the wedding. I'm still riding the high of both of this realizations! hehe
Doing this, I figured out exactly what I still needed. Only five things! And ordered 2 of them, aqua baker's twine and glassine bags, right then and there. Another of the items, craft paint, I will pick up later this week. The last two items I will have to wait until after all the at home reception RSVPs come in and I have a final headcount. I wouldn't want to order too many or not enough.
Next I went through our plan while we are on Maui and all of our vendors to see if there was anything I could make changes to. We don't have a lot of vendors and almost all of them we've gotten really great deals for their services. Really the only vendor to look at was the person doing mine and the wedding ladies' hair.
The cost for this vendor had always seemed really high to me, but I tried to go with it because he was supposed to be the best on the island. Still, I wasn't able to convince myself that he was worth that price. Especially when we were behind on having enough for our wedding budget. I got some quotes for others and realized he was more then twice the price of the quotes I was getting. YIKES! I decided the best thing to do was cancel him and re-book with another. So that's exactly what I did and in the process I saved us a nice large wad of benjamins!
Then I started looking at where we were planning on staying in Hana. We knew we really wanted to stay out in Hana for a couple days, but the hotel there was just so expensive. Since it's the only hotel there, I started looking around on VRBO to see what our other options were. I sure am glad I did that!
I found an amazing property that Drew and I fell for right away. I think it had us at one of Hana's most beautiful oceanfront pools, Waioka Pond (Venus Pool), being 300 feet away from the front door. Or maybe it was that the property is located in a coconut palm grove and surrounded by almost an acre of lush tropical flowers, fruit trees and bamboo. Or that we could pick our own papayas and avocados. Or that the screened front porch has a double bed looking out to the ocean where we could fall asleep to the sound of the ocean hitting the shore. Whatever it is, this place sounds like heaven to us.
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| Where we will be sleeping each night. {source} |
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| And heading out to each morning. {source} |
Amazing, right? To add to all of that, it's also a fraction of the price we were going to pay to stay at the hotel. A whole third of the price. Score! We booked it as quickly as possible and are so happy that we did. We cannot wait to stay in paradise!
We also decided to not do a couple things the way we were originally planning to for the at home reception. This mainly related to the favor we are giving to our guests. We decided to go a different route and ended up saving money on that as well since I found that if we went with a different favor we could buy it in bulk for half the price. We were so happy to have figured out another way to reduce our expenses even more and to be able to give our guests something that actually comes from the islands.
In the end, we were extremely happy with the changes we made and even more so with the money we saved. We may have been over the top stressed when we first realized how short we were on our wedding budget, but in the end it all worked out. For us, it all turned out for the better. We can't wait to share it all with you!
Did you have to make any changes to your wedding plans as you went along?
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