Jen Heaven

One more quick post to show you Jen Heaven. A couple of months after we got engaged, I started collecting glass bottles, mostly Schweppes Classic Mixers (turns out Adam and I drink a lot of gin and tonics/scotches and dry). I thought these might be nice and rustic looking for my flower decorations. I got a very large delivery of flowers from Tesselaar wholesale florist the morning before our wedding. I spent the next 4-5 hours arranging all these stunning flowers into my little bottles and some vases that Mum had bought me. So therapeutic. I guess it was Jen Heaven except for the fact that I knew all the flowers would die :(.

This is only half of them! Mum ended up coming over that day with about 10 bunches of flowers from Coles because she decided I needed more decorations. Sooo many flowers! Love the colours. So festive! 🙂

I put twine around some and hung them from the back fence to colour it up a bit.

Others were on some of the tables we had.

And you’ll see many more flowers in the background of many more photos once we get the professional photos back.

So Much To Tell You

I haven’t written a blog post since March 4th! Not because nothing is happening. Quite the opposite! Between March 4th and March 12th, we were frantically getting ready for this:

Then we spent a few weeks doing this:

And since getting home, I’ve been frantically trying to catch up on this:
(As well as working full time because I still hadn’t returned the contract that brought my hours down to .8).

Meanwhile, I have so much to tell you! I still haven’t finished our backyard reno problems list (which by the way is continuing and becoming a VCAT hearing now – yay!), whether we finished our backyard in time for our wedding, how it all looked, how my seedlings still looked like little tiny babies before the wedding and that I should listen to my mother more (she told me to plant them much earlier than I did), how all my herbs died when we were away :(, what we did with our vegie boxes for our reception, all the beautiful plants we came across in New Caledonia, the list is never ending!

For now, I just want to write a thankyou post for Marilyn, Syd, Brodie and Dane who sent us these for our wedding present. They’re absolutely stunning! I know nothing about sewing but I’m very impressed by how perfectly you’ve made these, Marilyn. We’ve already had good use out of the placemats, and I carry the tote when I go shopping. Such a thoughtful gift!

I’m still super behind with uni work since I didn’t do an ounce of study for the first four weeks of uni due to frantic wedding prep, backyard reno style. I just finished my case study so thought I’d reward myself by writing a blog post! Hopefully I’ll be here a little more during study breaks and between shifts at work!

So Satisfying

Nothing like a good scrub and a fresh coat of decking oil! Slowly getting the place looking spick and span for our wedding!

Wedding Planning

I’m not the kind of person who enjoys being the centre of attention. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. So I always envisaged my wedding to be a party in the park where I turn up in a white dress and everyone eats yummy food and drinks yummy alcohol and has fun and there are little to no formalities. Probably not your average girls wedding dream. My nieces, who have just turned 4, already have ideas of what their wedding will be like (a Cinderella wedding of course!). They will be bitterly disappointed when they come to my wedding.

There are 2 very big problems with having a party in the park. One: Melbourne weather is totally unpredictable. The worse thing ever would be to have a party in the park on a 45 degree day. And that same 45 degree day can quickly turn into a 20 degree windy and rainy day. Solution: Hire a marquee! Which brings me to problem two: you can’t just chuck a marquee in public parks around Melbourne. Otherwise there would be parties everywhere! The few parks where this is acceptable, eg. certain parts of the Royal Botanic Gardens, are really expensive and kind of formal looking and defeats the purpose of having a casual party in the park. My solution: have our wedding in our backyard! It doesn’t fix the Melbourne weather problem, but it’s an environment we have more control over. I would love love love to have a partly cloudy 25 degree day with no wind and no rain. That would be amazing. Thanks weather gods!

We have A LOT of work to do between now and our wedding. Ideally, we’d like to get married either February 27th or March 5th – last days of summer/first days of autumn kind of time. Hopefully this gets rid of any risk of days over 40 degrees. The average temperature for these times is 24 degrees, and the sun doesn’t set until just before 8pm. It means though that we haven’t got that much time to totally renovate our backyard (and partly renovate our kitchen to make it look respectable). I’ve also been worried about everyone and everything fitting in. Ideally, we want about 100 guests in our 140m2 backyard. Obviously, we won’t be having a sit down meal, which is cool because I didn’t want that kind of formal thing anyway. So, I spent a couple of hours today with a tape measure, ruler, pencil and sharpie and mapped out our backyard.

Our backyard currently looks nothing like this. We still have a 10x4m shed (not the 6x6m shed that’s drawn here), our path is in a different place, we have garden beds in different places, and our “paved area” is also going to change. The next 9 months will be busy! But everything is to scale (2cm=1m) so I’m getting a better idea of how everything is going to fit. As you can see I’ve only decided on where the cake table and presents table are going so far – bit more work to do yet! In terms of Melbourne’s unpredictable weather, we’ll hire a marquee (which size I don’t know! Maybe 8x8m?) and hopefully not have to set it up. It’d be so much nicer without. Plus we can be more space effective without it.

The other really tricky thing is where to have our ceremony (something I really don’t want but you kinda gotta do it cos that’s how you get married!). Once again, if the weather was perfect the solution is easy: we’d have a quick ceremony in a nearby park. There’s a park which is 8 mins walk (according to google maps so make that 5 mins walk) from our house called Loys Paddock which overlooks the Yarra River and is pretty secluded, and council said we could have a wedding ceremony there no problem. I guess that will be our aim, but if the weather is no good, we’ll just have the ceremony in our backyard under the marquee.

There are lots of conundrums and time restrictions, but I’m actually pretty excited. I bought our first decoration the other day (important things first!).

It was half price at our local discount store. How could I resist?