The wedding pile

For those of you who have never been over, or seen the virtual apartment tour I posted a while back, our apartment is pretty tiny. While there’s plenty of room for us, and the small size keeps prevents us from overbuying things we really don’t need, it also meant that when we started acquiring items for the wedding they had no where to go- except our dining room.

Yep, our beautiful red accent wall is slowly disappearing under our lovingly named “wedding pile.” Yikes.

I can’t believe we already have so much stuff- and we’ve still got almost four months to go and many more purchases to make! It’s probably a good thing we rarely eat at that table- I don’t think we’ll be able to see it pretty soon…

Since I know you’re all just dying to know what’s in the pile (and I figured it was a pretty good idea for me to take inventory) I’ve made a list of all of our wedding pile items:

• 5 cases of Christmas lights, or 30 boxes, or a whopping 3,000 lights! Our tent will definitely be well lit, if nothing else
• 14 cases of mason jars, which will double as drinking glasses/ place cards for guests
• 72 plates– we’re about half way to having enough for all of our guests!
• 50+ vintage mason jars, which will be used for centerpieces and random decor
• Several salsa/pickle/pasta sauce jars we’ve been collecting to use as candle holders (I have a cool spray paint project idea up my sleeve)
• My sewing machine- it won’t be out at the wedding, but is on standby for any sewing related wedding projects
• Empty wine bottles- these will also be used as candle holders and as beverage pitchers
• 2 vases/bowls that we’ll use for our vintage candy table, also a Goodwill score
• My antique typewriter, which I used to address all of the save the dates (and will be used to address all the invites- I need to start on that this weekend!)
• This old train case I’ve played with ever since I was little. I just dug it out of my old room and we’re planning on using it as our card box

•  And some odds and ends like the photo below, which will be used with the centerpieces and around the tent for a more antique-ish, homey decor

Whew! I can’t believe we’ve collected this much already, and especially can’t believe how much more we have to get! Hopefully I’ll have time to throw in a wedding pile post every once in a while so you all can marvel at it as much as I have been recently. In fact, it’s getting so out of control that we ended up using some of the mason jars for decoration around the apartment until the big day:

And Brian creatively stashed a few random marbles and made a little arrangement on the shelf above our entry door- gotta love that boy.

So, that is about all there is to the wedding pile these days. Brian is at a wedding today and is covering the NATO conference in Chicago all weekend, so I doubt we’ll be adding much more to it before next week. Although I am having my dress fitted followed by a shopping trip with my maid-of-honor tomorrow, so who knows what might find its way back to the pile!

Did any of you have wedding piles in the months leading up to your wedding? Two of our friends (who happen to be married) walked in a few weeks ago and laughed as they said “Ah, we remember this!” So I’m guessing it isn’t that uncommon. If you had a wedding heap, what was in it? Please share in the comments!