“Our wedding couldn’t have happened without our community and it definitely couldn’t have turned out as nice as it did without them. We were prepared to not have a nice wedding at all, but my friends really helped step it up to make it happen,” Reese says. “I luckily barely had to do anything because Shina really took charge. She was like ‘I’m gonna have you do minimal calling,’ because that was also the same week Rob was in home hospice. I think because of the uniqueness of the situation people really came to help.”

Involving close friends and family, especially those who have experience with weddings and events, is a way to reduce the load. Even if you have a clear idea of what you want, having a person to help pull it together makes the day more enjoyable. “I have a great friend who has a planning company and she helped pull it together,” Soames explains. “I definitely knew what I wanted it to look like, so from a styling perspective that was covered, and Tattie Rose led the floral side of it, which was a lot.”

“We tried to do as much locally as we could, using local caterers,” Soames says. “We ate chicken and chips for dinner.”

Photo: Chris Allerton Photography

Help with the planning is essential, but some couples could have used more help on the day of the event. Redding admits that it would have been nice to have more hands on deck during the day of the wedding. “It would have been good to have somebody in charge overseeing the day. We had a day of coordinator, but it’s really just such a whole production,” she says. “Even for a small, at-home wedding, maybe having somebody help manage that day in a more hands-on way could have been helpful.”

Luckily, her family was up for the challenge. “I left my full family in charge of setting this 100-foot long table,” Redding recalls. “They did an awesome job. One of my cousins is very artistic and great at tablescape type stuff so I was just like, ‘Can you set this?’ I never even walked her through the way I wanted it to look.” Having people you can trust to execute the details is essential.

Welteroth and Singletary’s wedding was also a collaboration with close friends. Sinclair Bolden, a partner at Everyday People, and musician Adeline Bolden were instrumental in the planning if their special day. “Imagine being stuck in a pandemic and you end up planning your own wedding on your stoop and the only two people that you’re doing it with happen to be a freaking event producer of the dopest events that you’ve gone to and then the other one happens to be a musician and DJ,” she says. “Every element of our wedding fell into place and just felt right. It was this divine orchestration of our community coming together to make it all happen.”

“For the tablecloth, we had these huge curtains that my mom had used for a project and we repurposed them by sewing them together to form a really long tablecloth.”

Photo: Hannah Shea

3. Relish the Opportunity to Add Your Personal Touch

For creative couples, having a wedding at home is a prime opportunity to put their talents to good use. In Redding’s case, it was a true labor of love. “I love planning parties and planning things in general, so it felt like a big, creative project for me,” she says. “My mom and I are very DIY. We decided, for some reason, instead of renting serving platters, to go to local junk stores and buy old stoneware and old platters that we liked. All the napkins were my mom’s mix-matched white napkins and we collected so many candlesticks from antique stores. It was just a whole project, which was really fun.”