"I Styled My Own Wedding for Under $1200 – Here Are the DIY Décor Tricks I Used"

Proof you can still pull off your perfect wedding on a shoestring budget.

After doing the math on how much her dream wedding would cost to outsource, Australian writer Lisa Hamilton decided to bootstrap the entire event herself. Here, she breaks down exactly how she managed it, and how much it all cost.

It’s no secret that brides are pretty particular when it comes to the details of their special day, and quite frankly I think we get a bad rap for it!

As I got to planning my dream wedding, it became pretty clear that I had a ~ vision ~ of how I wanted the day to look. But when my now husband and I started crunching numbers, we realized that our budget was going to be tight. Maybe tighter than would allow me to make bridezilla demands.

We floated the idea of eloping, or perhaps doing a Town Hall ceremony with our families. But every time we closed our eyes and imagined our wedding day, it was surrounded by all of our favorite people in one big party. And so we set out to make that dream a reality within the confines of the shoe-iest of shoestring budgets.

Flowers - $600

When I first started making inquiries about flowers, I told vendors that our budget was $3000. Of the vendors that were polite enough to respond to me, they curtly informed me that most floral packages start at $3000 for a few petals and for what I wanted I’d easily be looking at $12,500. I spat out my oat cappuccino and started to think about getting into wedding floristry as a career change.

So, how bad would it be if I just did the flowers myself? My friends all told me I was insane and that I’d be adding too much stress to my plate. I had an almost one-year-old daughter and so my time was already stretched. But I was convinced I could make this work. For months I rang multiple flower farms and wholesalers, all of them letting me know I was too late in the season to get anything decent. And so I had no choice but to hang all of my floral hopes and dreams on driving up to the Flower Market three days before the wedding and praying for the best.

Once I had decided I’d do it myself I started collecting vintage vases from secondhand stores. For months, my mother and I visited just about every thrift shop on the east coast of Australia hunting for those perfect glass vases in all different sizes. These would line the tables, welcome areas, bar and signing table for our wedding filled to the brim with beautiful flowers from the markets - I’d hoped.

At 3am just days away from the wedding, I bundled up into the car with my mom, mother-in-law and husband bound for the flower markets. We were NERVOUS. To our surprise we were basically the first people on site and had access to the most vibrant selection of flowers I had ever seen. Like a kid in a candy story I whimsically added bouquet after bouquet to our trolley with my husband anxiously watching the floral pile up. When the attendee rang up our haul, I winced before she told us it would be a grand total of $190. What a win!

Back home, I trimmed all of the flowers, arranged them in the vases and popped them in our hire cool room. I’m not too proud to say I checked on them every few hours to ensure they weren’t getting frostbite. In the end it was a huge effort, but so worth it.

High risk and high rewards.

Menus and name cards - $120

Again, perhaps I was incredibly naive, but when I started enquiring about menu and name card design I was shook at how expensive the service was. Not to downplay the artistry and creativity of these vendors, but sadly my budget was not going to come close to the fees outlined.

Armed with cocksure energy, I decided once again that maybe I could pull this off myself? I scoured the internet, watching videos on TikTok and filing through Etsy stores to finally feel somewhat confident I had acquired enough skills to fake it until ya make it. I found the most beautiful craft paper from a local seller and bought enough acrylic pens to sink a ship.

I designed all of our menus, name cards and instructions over a few nights. And look, they didn’t turn out perfect, but they were quaint and a little bit wonky. And if that isn’t the essence of how I live my life, then I don’t know what is.

Upcycling furniture - $0

One thing about my parents is they’re unassumingly sustainable. That’s to say they have quite a collection of furniture that used to fill the homes of my grandparents, stocked up high in the farm shed holding dust and memories. In a way, I wanted to try and upcycle some of these pieces to not only honor them (who have long since passed) but also to cut down on the unnecessary costs of hiring furniture.

I took an old cabinet and repurposed it as a display for the seating charts. I used a rusty camping table hidden under a linen tablecloth for the marriage certificate signing and the mirror that once sat in my grandmother’s room was placed under a big tree as a meeting spot for guests to take pictures.

These pieces were so special to me and became my ‘something borrowed’ for the day.

Signage - $500

Now, including the signage for my wedding on this list might be a bit contentious, as it wasn’t exactly DIY, but it was done on a budget and I’ll tell you how. I found a just-graduated graphic designer, sent her my mock ups for signage that I had made in Canva, she then polished the designs and sent them off for printing. Having worked in media for my whole career, coming up with creative briefs and working with designers is what I love doing – so this felt like an extension of what I’ve already been doing for years. Call it a collaboration if you will, and it came in at a fraction of the price of most quotes I was receiving for signage.

Dessert - $60

We had a cake made by a wonderful local baker, but I wanted the end of night to feel like a renaissance feast of desserts. With the help of my mom and mother-in-law, they spent hours baking cupcakes, brownies, cookies. You name it - they baked it. With all of the ingredients considered, this was a very cheap way to have a big impact, and the guests were extremely grateful to fill their booze-filled bellies with a little sweet treat to cap off the night.

Photography by Brendan Back.