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Well, hello lovely humans and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Wolfer, and I truly believe that wedding planning does not.

Need to be complicated or time consuming.

I kind of picture these episodes like.

Jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner.

You get your answers and you go.

On your merry way.

Because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it.

Today's episode is going to admittedly be a little bit all over the place. You see, every single month I sit down with the people over in the master plan course and answer your questions in Lifetime. So if you find yourself struggling and really need to sit down and speak with a real life wedding planner, I would love to be a part of your wedding planning journey. Join us over in the master plan today to get your questions answered. Until then, take a listen.

If I'm doing family style dinner, how long should the catering staff leave the bowls of food on the table before they clear them away? They should know the answer to this for sure. Not me, because I don't necessarily have a time frame for you. Unless zill. Are they non professionals doing this? Because if that's the case, I would say this. I've never really paid attention to the time that they clear this. Here's where my mind goes. I would have the caterers, if possible, or the servers, I'm sorry, remove the bowls, the, the plates, the platters, whatever, from the table and set them, combine them and set them off to the side as like a little mini buffet if anyone wants to go back for it. Because the, the idea of family style is that like you could, you know, you have all this food to eat from and a guest might think, oh, I'll just come back and eat it later because I really want to go on the dance floor and then I'll come back for snackies later or whatever. So I would think that combining them setting off to the side at a mini buffet style table will help if there's any leftovers and people kind of want to keep snacking or eating a little bit. But busing typically, but general bussing typically happens once dancing begins and it happens at tables where people are not seated first.

Generally speaking, sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to and you may be sitting there going, you know what, Jamie actually Yeah, that. That makes a lot of sense. I would love to be able to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the master plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much?

You.

You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the master plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out@wolferenco.com tmp that's wolferenco.com tmp Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all.

And I think it's important to make.

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I've never seen myself having a grand traditional wedding. My fiance and I are in our mid-30s and have a son. So when we heard the idea of a Sunday brunch wedding, we thought it was a perfect fit for us. That's cute. Cute. We love the idea. But having trouble putting together a timeline. Any advice? Okay, yes. You're probably either going to need to minimize the amount of things that you're doing before you get started or be prepared to wake up kind of early. And that's probably going to be personally your biggest choke point in the timeline for this. So let's say, and honestly, a brunch wedding can still start at noon. You can still just serve brunch items at a noon time. Don't feel like you have to have a 10 o' clock reception start time for it to be considered so like a brunch. So personally I would say maybe have. All right, let's spitball some timelines here. If you start at 10:30 for your ceremony, 10:30 to 11, 11 to 12 is cocktail hour. 12:00 clock is when you open up for the reception, guests get ushered in, and then you basically kind of go straight into eating. So that would still make sense. But at a 10:30 start time, that means your photography team's probably getting there at 8:30 in the morning and they typically get there as you're finishing Getting ready, right. So you're not completely all the way done. But if you're doing hair and makeup, that's usually when that happens. If I would recommend actually in this situation, maybe not doing a first look or getting a little creative with the timeline if, especially if you're concerned about it being a little tight, letting the photographers know about that. So streamlining your hair look, streamlining your makeup look to make sure that you can maximize on your amount of time in the morning. Because if it takes a couple hours for you to get ready, let's say an hour and a half to two hours, photography gets there at 6 or 8:30. That means you're kind of starting this whole process at 6, 6:30 in the morning. And then it's going to be pretty clipped from there. So I just want to make sure whatever you're doing in the morning is pretty streamlined, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. How many times can I say the word pretty in a 5 second span of time so you don't get too congested there. First look would probably end up taking 30 minutes, traditionally speaking. So that would obviously eat up quite a bit of time in the morning. Have all of your photos happen after your ceremony or as many of them as you can. This is actually one of the, one of the circumstances where I would not recommend doing a first look. I would like to get a suggestion on how to politely ask our guests to adhere to a specific dread code, which is we would like to ask for a cocktail or a more formal dress in the colors of fuchsia, teal or beige or green. So honestly, I would, I would say Google this and find a phrasing that you feel comfortable with. And I know that's like such a, like such a. Not great answer, not concrete answer I should say, but there is probably going to be plenty of phrasing that you can find online that'd be like, yes, actually, I really like that the intent that you're trying to communicate is we're going for a gorgeous color palette. We're super excited. We'd love to have you participate with us. Here are the suggestions. Since there is quite a few options here, I would maybe go as far as to include those on the invitation when you send them out because you might get some real confused people on this one. Like what kind of green, what kind of teal, what kind of fuchsia. Are you getting really specific on that? Um, yeah, so find the phrasing online again, because honestly, what I do is I would literally, if, if you were my client, we're sitting in a meeting, I'd be like, I'm gonna Google it. Let's find, let's find phrasing that we like instead of just kind of inventing something for you off the spot because it's probably not gonna be as good as whatever we find. And then be very specific in what those colors mean and reiterate that on your website. And don't be afraid to communicate your why? Why are you doing it? Because you love these colors. Because you want to be really vibrant and you're really excited about it because it's a social experiment. I don't know what have you.

If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the master plan community over@themasterplanwed.com I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a five star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time, bye guys.