Questions. Questions that need answering.

I've been engaged a little over a week. I'm not sure what normally happens in that first week for most ladies -- I'm pretty sure that my overflowing happiness, my inner Martha Stewart mental craft store brain explosion, and my initial panic as the idea of "wedding planning" sinks in are all common. I talked a little in my first post about trying to wrap my brain around some of the particulars of what the Hayes wedding will need to entail. I'm at a point where I'm still working on those details, and a lot of the rest of my plans will probably need to hinge on those.

I've noticed that there are plenty of wedding websites that provide checklists of things brides "need" to do to plan their wedding. There's the supposedly-personalized monstrosity of a list at The Knot, which tells me I should have done 30 things already -- and when I examine them, I realize how few of them are neccessary and how many are just there to direct you to different articles on their site that tell you how much money you ought to be spending on save the date photo magnets and other such junk. Many of the others aren't quite designed that much to be lists of advertising, and they all include pretty standard fare.

My favorite one so far is the Offbeat Bride Wedding Checklist. I've printed off the PDF and have it in my (so far extremely plain) binder. It's got all the basic items on it, along with a healthy dose of humor. Any list that starts out with "Ok, don't lose your shit. We can do this together." is a winner.

DIY Bride also links to some neat tools. I may give the Wedding Wire Wedding Checklists a try, along with the Google Docs wedding templates. There's a way to plan your wedding with any device -- iPhone, iPad, toolbars for your browser (on a whim, I threw The Knot's toolbar on my Firefox, but haven't really felt led to use it at all...).

So far, all I've really wanted to use is a combination of my own Google Docs that I've been piddling with even before I got engaged and a binder to carry around my info with me in case I ever need to show it to others (if I use any real vendors, for instance).

Now that I'm starting to figure out what I need to plan, I have a set of particulars that I need to fill in. And these are:

• People - We know the answer to this one.
• Place - Actually, we know the answer to this one, too, even though it's not official. It's a gorgeous church, it's the church Johnny grew up in, it has as much room as about any church in the area (a ton of room more than most!), and it's a gorgeous facility. I'm pretty much willing to get married on their schedule as long as we can do it there. Speaking of which...
• A Date - Uh. Well. I thought we had that one figured out, but now I'm not so sure. I'm not even sure on a month. I keep waffling between next October (in which case the date would be October 22, 2010) and sometime in July or early August. October would give us a year to save and prep my DIY stuff, but we could have extra outdoor space and cheaper dresses for my bridesgals if we did it during a warmer month. I have two kickass themes in mind, one that would fit with either time, so whichever way we decide, it'll be fun.
• A Budget - This is a doozy. In fact, the budget is probably going to be the most crucial part of this wedding, and it's the also the most squirrely part right now. At one point last summer, I had 3K saved up for a wedding. Since moving in with Johnny, buying a new catalytic converter, and having a ton of other random expenses, that's been whittled down to 1.5K, and I have a feeling it will be less than 1K (at best) by the 2011. This is where having a very helpful and crafty mom and future mom-in-law, great friends who know how to dj and take great photos, and my own love of crafty things comes in super handy. I know that I can find creative solutions to my budget limitations.

What a lot of this comes down to is that I'm extremely grateful for online resources that focus on how to make a wedding that's wonderfully, uniquely yours without costing a fortune and looking awesome at the same time. I've noticed that whenever I get down about money (or lack thereof) and start feeling like I don't know how we'll afford a wedding, looking at these websites always makes me feel better and sparks my creativity. I'm glad to have such great resources at my fingertips.