THE GRASS MAY NOT BE SO GREEN-WHEN D.I.Y. COSTS MORE

Weddings can cost a huge amount of money, so it's tempting to cut corners wherever you can. Why hire a professional photographer when all your guests will have camera phones? Why hire a DJ when you can throw your favorite playlist on shuffle? Why hire a caterer when your mother can surely bake lasagna for 200 people? As optimistic as you may be, though, do-it-yourself projects don't always save money. In fact, they can end up costing a lot more. Here's how to make sure you don't get caught in a DIY money pit.

DIY Flowers
Flowers are made of delicate stuff. They bruise and wilt easily. They need to be kept at the right temperature and humidity. They need to be put into water with the right nutrients. As strong as your artistic inclinations may be, arranging the flowers is only half of the battle. Live flowers need to be arranged a day or two (at most) before the wedding. Normally, that's when out-of-town friends & family will be arriving, you'll be shuttling back and forth to last-minute vendor and beauty appointments and you might want to attend a bachelorette party too. The inevitable last-minute fluster often results in rushed floral arranging that spoils the flowers, wasting the money you spent.

If you absolutely must put a personal stamp on your wedding florals, choose silk flowers instead of live ones. That way, you can schedule multiple craft nights in the months leading up to your big day and complete the task at your leisure. Plus, if anything goes wrong, there's still plenty of time to hire a professional.

DIY Food
You may have heard inspiring stories of "Family Catering" going off without a hitch. However, the reason these stories are passed around so readily is precisely because they're so amazing. For the average bride and groom, cooking a meal for a hundred of their closest friends isn't something they've done before. If you're picturing cooking on a large scale to look anything like cooking for a dinner party, you're missing a few essential details.

Ask yourself a few questions: When will you cook the food? You'll likely be busy for the few days before your wedding. Where will you store the food before the wedding? Your refrigerator and freezer may not be big enough. How will you transport the food to the wedding site? Do you have a vehicle large enough to lay the trays flat? How will you keep the food the right temperature during the reception? Do you have portable heaters and ice trays to maintain safe temperatures? How will you serve the food? Do you own enough serving platters, lids, and serving utensils?
By the time you're done buying pots large enough to fit everything in and renting extra refrigerators, you may have generated a budget larger than you would just by hiring a caterer.

Unless you've completed a similar project enough times that you could do it in your sleep, it's hard to know exactly what materials and how much time you'll need to finish everything. Otherwise, you could end up scrapping a failed project at the eleventh hour and purchasing new items anyway.
As with all DIY undertakings, the most important part of achieving success is impeccable planning. Never assume you can "figure it out" along the way. Only commit yourself to making items you have made successfully in the past–and even then, understand the difference between making them on a small scale and a large one. If you can't visualize every step of the process from buying the materials to presenting the end result, it's probably a lot cheaper to hire a professional.