happyconnected

One of the challenges with using a blank canvas, such as a house that is not typically rented out for weddings, is coming up with a vision.  The more I work on wedding planning, the more convinced that it is an exercise of creating a vision that is right for you, and using that vision to make choices  in the midst of countless options avail to you.  I used the Springpad clipper to quickly capture images that I like from Google images and pinterest.

I was able to come up a few that my fiancee agrees with.   After a few of these, I think both of us have a more concrete idea of how we want the house to look like on our big day, candles around the edge of the pool, paper lanterns hanging across strings of light, and intimate table arrangements.

I’ve included these images on the below slideshow (I have to save the images from Springpad onto my computer and upload them onto wordpress).  In a Spring item, you can also upload multiple images and scroll through them,  similar to the slideshow here.

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This exercise of gathering inspirations took less than thirty minutes!  I believe that planning is by leaps and bounds easier with inspirational tools like Google images, pinterest, and Springpad.

My fiancé and I started doing research last week on houses to have our wedding (we’re hoping to have our wedding in first week of June 2013 so we have roughly six months to plan).  We envision our wedding to be at the backyard of a house where we can have his family stay with us a few days prior to the wedding.  We decided to rent a home since we want to bring our caterer (vegetarian Chinese food, vegetarian Indian food), provide our guests with open bar all night, and have flexibility on how we structure our program.

We used the following websites: airbnb, vrbo, and homeway.  The process of researching seemed pretty daunting at first.  Both of us needed a way to look at the results of each other’s finds in real time.  It was helpful to have him see the items I researched so that he can provide his opinion before I contacted the owners.  There were a few listings that he thought were completely out of budget or the location too small.

To share the results of our research effectively, we reverted back to the Wedding notebook we opened in Springpad a few months ago (both of us have springpad accounts online and on our phone).  We made sure we had the Springpad web clipper installed on our web browser (we currently use Chrome).

When either one of us finds a listing we like, we would launch the clipper icon and press the scissor icon to clip the page into a spring item (the process is called springing; and once is is saved into Springpad, it’s considered sprung.

The beauty in using Springpad is that you can see the corresponding photo on the page (a photo of the house of a particular listing).  The photo shows up as an icon when you show multiple Spring items on a list or a full photo when you’re open up the Spring item.  The Spring item also shows a map of the location.  You can click on the web address in the item to navigate to the page.  There is also an opportunity for users of the notebook (private) to comment.  This feature is particularly helpful for multiple reasons.  My fiancée copied and pasted the message he sent to a owner of a listing so that I can use the same message when I emailed owners of the listings I found.  We also use the comment feature to take notes on a particular listing (for example, when I saw the outdoor sauna of a house I like, I immediately thought of converting that into a photobooth!).

We stayed up to 3AM Sunday morning doing research. It was the first time we spent more than an hour on researching since we became engaged.  He had a couple of responses within twenty four hours and we were able to identify which listings were feasible.  And this morning (one week later), we saw one of the houses we found last weekend and the location seems like it can be a great canvas for something amazing.  The challenge we notice is that we have to do some leg work to transform what we see into our vision.