From Wedding World Back into Reality
Posted on | May 5, 2010 | 12 Comments
Registries, gowns, the best cuts of meat, champagne, and the finest sheets with high thread counts: weddings are a far cry from reality. Everything is delicate, brilliant, and made to be consumed as if it were the last you would ever experience in your entire life. Weddings are so different from weeknights with leftover meals on lackluster plates, and morning commutes where you are again just a number.
It is easy to become caught up in the world of wedding, where everything is shiny and expensive (or at least more than you would spend on the same thing in the real world). It is easy to begin to feel like you have reached a certain point in your life that now everything should be brilliant and expensive and that you should own the best that the stores have to offer. Newness becomes a way of life: you need new shirts and socks for the honeymoon, a new home, new dishes and cookware and furniture to add to your new home, new everything because you are leading this new life. The idea of fresh starts is enticing, and it is easy to think that fresh starts equate to new everything.
While thinking about fresh starts in a cabin full of used leftovers (a set of couches from first apartments, Tupperware with warped lids, a large cupboard of pots and pans each from a different person’s throwaways, etc.) I look over at Paul with a realization. “You know, we never did get that trashcan.” Paul giggles, his eyes squinting slightly as if remembering all about the notorious trashcan, and wondering how on earth his father had not lived up to his side of the bargain by buying it for me in some sort of reverse dowry transaction.
Paul first brought me home to Texas in 2003 for his brother and sister-in-law’s wedding. I was standing in the kitchen of their new home they had just purchased, staring at a gorgeous stainless steel trashcan that looked too pretty to hold trash. Paul’s father came over to me and said “you like that?” I nodded, because I did, and also because I knew that he had bought it for them. “Well if you marry my boy, you can have one of those, too.” My face had turned hot red. Over the years it became a joke between Paul, his father, and I that all I had to do was to marry Paul and I, too, could be an owner of such a shiny, new trashcan. In fact, Paul and I purposefully had picked one out and put it on our registry, thinking that it would be the first to be purchased.
“So, why don’t we buy it off of our registry anyway?” Our conversation had continued from the cabin to the car trip we were now taking. I was thinking now about our trashcan at home: a white, stained container without a lid that I had just tried to bleach before leaving for our wedding and honeymoon. I knew that we had several gift cards waiting to be spent as well.
We were now driving down the side of a mountain, staring out into nature and a beautiful creek meandering along the road beside us, flashing silvery threads of light where the trees above had parted just enough to allow the sunshine through. Paul broke the silence. “We don’t need it. I’d rather spend $100 on something more important than a container to hold our trash.” Perhaps more realistic words in a financial sense have never been spoken before. I looked over at Paul, beaming with pride. Of course we didn’t need a $100 trashcan to store our trash. Who does? At that moment I realized that I had fallen into the wedding world wholeheartedly in the last few weeks, and that I could just as easily slip back from it all and forget about all of the newness, all of the made-up needs, and just enjoy our new world together—a world with an old, stained trashcan, a gorgeous and quirky cat, a homemade quilt from a woman in the Appalachian mountains I have yet to meet, some dishes from Paul’s bachelor days, and an almost-finished laundry room. What could be better than that?
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12 Responses to “From Wedding World Back into Reality”
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May 5th, 2010 @ 9:51 am
I think it’s liberating when we realize that what we have is good enough. Helps you relax and be truly happy.
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May 5th, 2010 @ 10:44 am
Sandra,
Hello!
I think you are right. Thanks for the comment:).
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May 5th, 2010 @ 4:59 pm
Hubby and I had a very frugal wedding for $3000 that was split between my parents, his, parents, and us, so we didn’t have that “newness” thing YET. Even our Las Vegas honeymoon was less than $900.
Then we bought a house and started watching home shows. All of the sudden, I was lusting after granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. Luckily, I was too cheap to actually follow through on everything, but we did have the cruddy carpet downstairs replaced with wood laminate and repainted the whole bottom floor as well.
Just to be safe, I no longer watch HGTV…
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May 5th, 2010 @ 5:08 pm
Oh boy–I LOVE HGTV:). So many great ideas! Thanks for your comment.
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May 6th, 2010 @ 8:19 am
Budgeting, I too had granite counter top fever when I redid my kitchen but at $30 plus dollars a sq ft, that just wasn’t going to happen. What I ended up doing was putting in 12″x12″ granite tiles. It was a nice compromise in that I got granite and it was less than $10 a sq ft.
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May 6th, 2010 @ 8:21 am
Hey BluSky!
That’s a great idea–I’ve heard it cuts down cost, and you still have the granite. Also, you can make the distance in between the tiles very small.
In Houston at the Habitat for Humanity Store off of 610, I found that they install granite (solid, not the tiles) for $25 per square foot. There are less options to choose, but that is $10 less per square foot.
Paul and I are still debating what to do with our counters (which are currently vinyl of some sort)…but one thing is for sure, no work on them for awhile! We have a master bathroom without a floor right now:).
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May 6th, 2010 @ 4:04 pm
We decided that the countertops that the house came with are very useful. I hate white countertops, but these don’t stain or get chipped, so we just bought matching white (which is cheaper anyway) appliances and saved the money .
I really wish I knew what these countertops actually are for future reference…
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May 6th, 2010 @ 7:34 pm
Amanda, you and Paul should make a weekend of laying some tile in your bathroom. It’s easy. Whether or not it’s expensive really just depends on the materials you choose to use and I’ve got a small wet tile saw y’all can borrow if you want.
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May 7th, 2010 @ 10:14 am
Hello BluSky!
Thank you for the offer:). We are definitely going to lay our own tile, even though we’ve never done it before. I think it is something we are very capable of doing. Wish us luck:)
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May 10th, 2010 @ 11:15 am
Scott and I did tile in our powder room… it was easier than we thought! good luck
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May 13th, 2010 @ 12:24 pm
Nice reality check! Thanks for sharing!
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May 13th, 2010 @ 12:44 pm
Hi Lakita! Thanks for the comment.
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