theDIBB - Helen and Andy's UK wedding

Hello, and welcome to my Wedding and Honeymoon report. This actually feels crazy to be writing this as it still doesn’t feel real to be planning our wedding!

Introductions
First up is myself. I’m Helen and I’m currently 31 and I live in Leeds.
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I work for a local university, which leads me to my wonderful fiancé, Andy.
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Andy is 35 and also lives in Leeds. He also works for the same local university, but we work in completely separate departments and even separate campuses. However; we have always worked together and we actually met at work in our previous jobs about ten years ago. It was my first full time job after uni and on my second day I got talking to this man outside work and fancied him straight away but it was coming up to Christmas and he said he was taking the afternoon off work to get the kids their Christmas presents so I assumed he was happily married and tried not to think about him again. Our work was quite sociable so we ended up going out as a large group and I got chatting to him and found out that he was actually single so we spent about a month of harmless flirting when one day on the stairs he asked me what I was up to that evening. I said that I had no plans and he said that if he had any money then he’d have taken me out. The next week was pay day so when I bumped into him again I asked him if he was now going to take me out. So we arranged to meet after work that day for a drink. Well one drink turned into quite a few and he ended up getting me a taxi at about midnight after a cheeky first kiss. He text me the next day and we had a bit of a conversation and then saw each other at work on Monday, and on the Friday I managed to invite myself on a night out with him and his brother (to a rugby match) and met his Mum too.. and so it began :grin:

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Us back in 2008

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Us back in 2014

We moved in together 10 months after we first started going out into our first rented house and bought our first home together a year later. In February we celebrated our ninth anniversary and had discussed marriage in the past but Andy had always said “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” (which he had his reasons for and I respected this) so I always assumed that we wouldn’t get married.

The Proposal
In May 2015 my parents invited us to go to New York with them to celebrate my Dad’s 60th birthday. On our first full day there me and Andy spent the day on our own and walked through Times Square and back up to Central Park. We ended up getting quite lost in the park and I was tempted to just leave and go find a bar for a drink, when Andy suggested that we go and sit down under a quiet tree and watch the world go by. We were sat down having a nice chat when Andy asked me if I thought that visiting New York was life changing. Now, I’m not the best with catching hints so at this point I told him that it wasn’t because I’d already been when I was younger (it seemed like a weird question to ask). He then asked me if I would like to make it life changing and reached into his pocket and produced the most gorgeous ring I have ever seen (I know I’m biased but I am still so in love with my ring). At this point I covered my eyes with my hands and I couldn’t believe that this was happening. He then got ‘up’ onto one knee and asked me if I would be his wife. I replied with “of course” and I then held out my hand for him to put the ring on. He later told me that he’d been practicing for ages which finger the ring went on, but had then forgotten in the moment. I love this man. Anyway, we spent the rest of our holiday in New York in a bubble of bliss and I couldn’t believe that we were finally going to be married.

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(our tree)

He said that he had been thinking of getting married for a couple of years but was always worried about doing it right and wanting to be able to afford the wedding that he believed I deserved, so when he got a promotion at work he was finally able to pick out a nice ring for me and know that we could afford the actual wedding.

Wedding Plans
We discussed what we were going to do about the wedding and we both decided that we wanted to be married sooner rather than later, but we also knew where we would want to go on honeymoon (go on, take a guess) so wanted to take into account the time of year when we liked to visit. Plus, we both work for a university and have very busy summers so wanted to avoid the summer months, so it would be either April/May or October/November time. I’m currently studying part time for an Open Uni degree, which will finally end in June 2016 so we decided that we should wait until after then. We then realised that we wanted to be able to go on Honeymoon when it was warmer so decided to get married in October. We didn’t want early October because that’s the end of the rugby season for us so we identified Saturday 15th October 2016 as the perfect day.

We are on a bit of a budget because we had only moved house last year and had to pay out quite a bit due to negative equity on our old house, so I did quite a bit of research into different venues for our wedding and created a spread sheet that shows all the pros and cons for each venue (also, we ruled out an Orlando wedding due to Andy having such a large family who he wanted to be at the wedding – I don’t have any extended family so I could have easily got married abroad, but I understand how important his family are to him (and to me) so I get why he had strong views on this). As big as Leeds is, there weren’t many venues that ticked the boxes for me (the nicest ones were just too expensive for us) so we started looking further afield and I remembered that a couple of years ago me and my Mum had visited a spa at a hotel in Knaresborough, which is a small town near Harrogate in North Yorkshire and they had been advertising a wedding fair, so I looked them up online and really liked the wedding brochure. I also liked the idea of getting married in Knaresborough because it’s a beautiful town and I could imagine going back for our anniversaries etc. so I priced it up and it came in well under budget. We booked to go and see them the next weekend and although we’d already been to see a couple of other venues that we had liked, there was just something different about this one. It very much felt like us because it’s a smaller venue and felt quite intimate (without being too small for our friends and family).

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So, we put down a deposit for it and got in touch with North Yorkshire Registrar Office. We had thought about what time we wanted to get married and really wanted 12noon because we thought this would give people time to get to the venue and also not leave a huge gap between the wedding breakfast and the evening do. The Registrar was only available at 12 or 4pm, which meant that we were lucky that they had our desired time. We are booked to give our Notice of Marriage this Friday, so it’s all starting to feel very real!