We are now down to 63 days left to finaly I do.
So Let me just share to you how are we able to come up with our final list.

The Most Important List

Of course we have more than 50 most important people in our lives. This is basically the reason why were holding a church wedding with 200 guests by next year. But this year, we can only accommodate 50 guests maximum.

Always remember that your guestlist that the catering will consider always includes the bride and the groom. So that will automatically block 2 slots from your total count. This is a civil wedding. You might as well consider feeding your officiant, right? There you will have 3 slots blocked. This leaves us with 47 open slots. to make this even for both parties, we will divide it into 2, then insert our most precious family and friends to fit in, with girlfriends/boyfriends and kids at the least priority. This leaves us with 23 slots for the bride, 23 slots for the groom and 1 buffer slot for any of our family or special friends who might need it. So that was how we were able to accommodate everyone within 50pax. To give you somehow a peek, I am showing you an illustration of our 50-seater floor plan for the intimate wedding for this year. It is also best to maintain a guestlist tracker in a manner you are most comfortable with, so that you will know if a table is already full or which group occupies the next tables.

I believe the seatplan can be the most challenging part of the planning. As the challenge is to keep your guests acquainted and entertained at the same time. So the trick is to play around with what kind of tables and chairs your suppliers may have. be it a 10-seater round table, 8-seater, mixture of rectangle and round tables, as long as it still fits the venue and it will still have room for your guests to move, your styling to be noticed, your decors to be appreciated, and of course, your moment to be enjoyed and witnessed by everyone. Thus, bringing me to the concept of working on a floor plan. This is where I visualized the comfort level of the guests and placing the elements of the venue decors, alongside with the catering equipments and other necessary details. Not to mention that it is easier to discuss with your vendors when you have a clear floor plan in mind.

Making Time Zones and Distance Meet

The Sub-Challenge: We want them to witness this remarkable event, but we can no longer accommodate them due to limited seats, or distance and time is the barrier. As much as we want perfection, we want that nothing can be perfect. But there are always ways on how to make ends meet. There are a lot of friends that we weren’t able to invite, due to very limited guest list plan, kids that we discouraged to include in the event since it is just an intimate one, and close family members that are working overseas which we cannot invite as well.

We are fully aware also that they would wish to witness our official union, which made us come up with a little something extra prepared for them. With the use of  technology and live streaming, they will be able to join us with the use of social media and the world wide web.

Youtube, Facebook and Ustream can provide free accounts to individuals who wish to live stream their events and make it accessible either to the public, or only to people close to them. That way its as if we also have all of them within one venue, joining us in our union, or catching up at a later time in case that they won’t be able to make it on real-time. We’re still on the preparation process with this one as of now, but we will be posting an update here once the plan has already been executed, as well as tips on how to do it on your own without spending so much.