Wedding Essentials: How to Organize Rentals on Your Special Day

Planning a wedding is a dream and a nightmare. Sure, it’s the day you’ve dreamed of your whole life, whether you’ve admitted it or not, but planning to rent or buy everything essentially redefines the word “nightmare.” Fortunately, with these easy planning tips, you can dramatically reduce your wedding rental nightmare. There may be a few outliers, but once you’ve decided on a supplier, planning will be a lot easier. Be Kind, Combine Whenever possible, aggregate. It’s bad enough that you have to arrange for a thousand and one items to be delivered the morning of your big day; why would you want to make that worse by communicating with a thousand and one different companies. Now, it’s true that aggregating can have its pitfalls—the worst case scenario being that the one company isn’t able to deliver the items to your event. But this can easily be avoided by only relying on a competent wedding rental company. Search online company reviews to make sure your company is reliable. If the company was able to deliver table cloths and plates the day before the big day every time, you can probably rely on them. What to Rent, What to Buy Depending on your budget and the type of wedding you plan to host, you may want to buy certain items, but when in doubt, rent. Obviously, perishable items like food and flowers are a must. But when it comes to things that you will only wear once, like the dresses and tuxedos, renting might be your best option. True, we’ve all spent a Saturday or two watching those bridal shows where money is not an object. But the truth is that if you’re starting your life together, you probably already have too many things. And you will never wear the dress or tuxedo again. If you can’t find anything you like at a rental shop, by all means buy. Otherwise, save your money to spend it on items everyone will enjoy, like linens and a gorgeous wedding cake. When to Ask for Help Even if you’re a full-blown fashionista who worships at the altar of Kate Spade and Manolo Blahnik, unless you’ve planned several weddings, you probably don’t know how to match table cloths to napkins, let alone match your linen rental to your flowers, the venue’s carpeting, your lighting scheme, and your wedding party. You can rely on your own palate when it comes to choosing aperitifs and main courses, but when it comes to arranging the entire scheme, you’ll definitely want to turn to the professionals.