Help! i need a wedding day timeline with no first look and ceremony starts at 6:30, cocktail hour starts at 7pm, reception starts at 8pm.

It's hard to answer your questions, because these are the kinds of things that vary from wedding to wedding. The time that the various dances, cake cutting, etc. happen depends on the couple getting married. These times are totally up to you and FH! There is no right answer. It's all about what works best for you.

It looks like you have a handle on it though. Dinner right after cocktail hour, followed by toasts/speeches, dances, cake cutting, then send off. You shouldn't need more than 10 minutes for speeches, 10 minutes for special dances, and about 15 minutes for cake cutting.

In terms of when your wedding party should arrive, you have to figure out how long will it take for pro hair and makeup? Are you the only one getting hair and makeup done? If so, ask your hair and makeup artist how long it will take. If she says 2 hours, then you know you need to start that process no later than 4:30pm, in order to be ready by 6:30pm. Same thing for the groomsmen and bridesmaids. Figure out how long it takes to get ready (this will also depend on where they are getting ready, if not on site), and then work backwards from your ceremony start time. Everyone has to be ready to walk by 6:25, so work backwards from there.

Don't worry, you have plenty of time to figure this out. Hopefully what I just said will help a little.

View Quoted Comment Thanks Christy!!

Just a word of warning that that might be a little tight if you want lots of dancing. We had a similar timeline for our wedding, except we did a first look and didn’t really do a formal cocktail hour.

Due to unforeseen weather conditions, it took people a while to get from our church to the reception, so even though we planned for it to start at 7:30 it didn’t really start until eight. We ended up having a informal cocktail hour while people were trying to arrive. Dinner didn’t get done until 9 o’clock or so, we did the dances during dinner and did the cake cutting and speeches immediately after dinner. We were visiting the tables during dinner, we made sure we got our food and ate quickly so we could visit with everybody. We had a 100ish person wedding and it took at least 45 minutes for table visits.

We were able to get the dance floor open from 9:30 to 11 PM, and we had our entire wedding begging for more songs at the end of the night. While that left us with a great memory because people were having fun, we wished that we had planned to end the evening at 11:30 PM or 12.

I’m not trying to dissuade you from anything, I would just make sure you have a little bit of extra time budgeted and be aware that you may not have quite as much time for dancing as you are hoping. I am one of those people that likes to cram in as much as possible and had a super ambitious timeline for how everything would work. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite as planned but it was still a wonderful wedding :-)

That's a pretty tight timeline.

We didn't have a first look, and we were at the same venue, but our ceremony was at 5(ish), and we went until 11PM.

Get ready - 2PM (we were very simple, so we had a leisurely 3 hours that included pizza and chilling out)

Ceremony - 5PMish

Pictures/Cocktail hour - 5:45/6PMish

Reception - 7PM

(Swordfight) - 7:05PM

Dinner - 7:30PM

Dances - 8:15PMish

I honestly don't remember when the cake cutting was, it was probably after 9PM.