Party on a Budget

In my previous post, I wrote about the party we had for the men who worked on our house. This is the post to describe, at least in part, how we planned the party so that we would stay within our budget. Matt suggests the men skip this post--"TMI" (too much information), he says.

I did have more lead time than I had originally planned for getting things ready for the party. We first thought we'd have the party at the end of June, but when one of the contractors couldn't make it at that time, we moved the party out a couple of weeks. This extra time ended up working to my advantage.

I knew the majority of my budget would be spent on food. I wanted to serve the bratwurst that are made in the small town where I spent many summers of my youth working harvest with my family. They actually sell the sausages at one of the grocery stores down here, so with each shopping trip, I would throw a couple of packages into my cart. I did this over the course of a few months, to "spread out the pain," so to speak.

I bought all the buns for the brats and the hot dogs (which we served to the kids) at the bread outlet. The Fourth of July sales on pop and Capri Suns helped me out in the beverage department.

Matt and I made a big run to Costco a couple of days before the party to load up on fruits, vegetables, potato chips, paper plates, plastic silverware and cups.

Since most of my budget went towards food, the girls and I tried to brainstorm ways to keep the decoration and activity expenses way down. I bought some polyester twine at the hardware store and set the girls to cutting out flags from our fabric stash in the basement. Our ping pong table worked great for this activity, which kept the girls occupied for the greater part of last week (thereby keeping their minds off of their absent Daddy). They used fabric glue to attach the flags to the string. They cut out some plain white flags so that we could stamp "To God Be the Glory" on them. We used fabric paint and some letter stamps that I had gotten at a yard sale for a dollar. We attached these strings of flags to the house, pergola and fence posts. The girls also attached flags to wooden skewers to put in all my outdoor potted plants.
(The picture above was the only one we took of the flags. Unfortunately, the wind tangled the string of colored flags with the "To God Be the Glory" flags.)

I had wanted to cover our rented tables with fabric table cloths, but I didn't have enough big cloths in my own stash and my thrift store runs turned up nothing. So I opted to use a roll of purple plastic table covering that I had gotten at a yard sale for 50 cents a couple of years ago.

The girls and I wanted flowers on the tables, so we asked a local florist the girls know about filling our mason jars with daisies. She wanted twenty dollars per jar to fill them herself, ten dollars per jar if we arranged the flowers ourselves. We were planning on five to six tables, so we quickly dismissed this idea. My hydrangea bush was in bloom, so we decided to cut nearly all of the blooms off to put in the jars. We did this the night before the party. They looked great on the purple tables.

I bought six gunny sacks at the feed store for ninety nine cents each to use for the gunny sack races. We can reuse the sacks, but even if we couldn't I thought that price was a bargain. We always keep a full stash of water balloons on hand which I buy on clearance at the end of each summer. We already own a three-man sling shot with which to shoot them.

Our other ideas for kids included egg-in-spoon races, badminton, wiffle ball, a tent to play house in and a nylon train in which to play (all of which we already own, none of which we actually used because of the wind).

Matt loaded music onto his MP3 player and attached it to our outdoor speaker. We rented tables, chairs, two beverage coolers for water and two misters for a nominal fee. We had expected 90 degree plus weather. It turned out we could have easily made due with one beverage cooler and skipped the misters all together, but who could have known, except God Himself?

We had a ton of food left over, but I packaged a bunch of it up for our families to take home. We have nearly finished our leftovers, with the exception of the bratwurst, which I froze for future use.

The one thing we would do differently if we had it to do over again is sending written invitations. We contacted our guests via phone a couple of weeks before the party and even though everyone said they would be here, we had some no shows. I think had we sent out written invitations, the party would have been less likely to have slipped off some peoples' radar.

All in all, we felt the party went as well as it could have considering the weather. We had a plan in place for keeping the party moving, which it did (and not just because of the wind, either :) Hopefully our next big shindig will be an improvement over this one, especially if there is no hurricane predicted.