BRITTANY & BRYCE | NOCTON WOOLSHED

Beautiful pops of red, white and orange created a stunning contrast against the greenery of the country side and the corrugated iron and the rimu floors of Nocton Woolshed. With a very clear vision in mind, and a lot of attention in the details, Brittany and Bryce certainly had a wedding for the books. Also featured on the Together Journal - we hope you enjoy this wedding as much as we enjoyed being part of it.

Where did you find your inspiration for your wedding day:

Instagram and Pinterest - but I had a very clear vision in my head of how i wanted things to look and actually collected most of my decor from op shops or made myself.

Where did you purchase your dress and accessories from:

Dress: Hayes bridal - I really wanted a minimalist, timeless, but different dress and I felt this dress from Hayes Bridal gave me all those elements. Alice was amazing to work with! She was so kind and made the whole process of amending the dress to add a split to the leg, a breeze! My second dress was also a very simple satin evening gown, which was also made by Hayes Bridal. I wanted something a little easier to party the night away in, but still wanted to be super elegant and still look like a bride.

Earrings: Zoe & Morgan

Shoes: Flattered a Swedish brand - they were a gift from my sister as she lives in Sweden.

Our wedding style was…

Minimalist rustic

Love Club’s Bar Leaners, Stools & Umbrellas

Tell us about your venue and why you choose it:

Nocton Woolshed had the relaxed but beautiful feel we were looking for, it was close to home and in comparison to other competitors they had really reasonable rates. We both fell in love with it on our first viewing and I was already planning all the finer details of how we wanted everything to look on our way home.

Tell us about the proposal…

We were going away for the weekend down to Tairua for our four year anniversary. We were leaving on a Friday morning and he insisted that we leave at 5.30-6.00am on the Friday. Naturally I wasn't very impressed by this, I just didn't understand what the rush was. He told me he wanted to “miss the traffic”. Well, we live in Pukekohe and were heading south at 6.00am on a Friday morning… WHAT “TRAFFIC”! Anyway he wasn't budging, so on Friday morning we left for our weekend getaway at the crack of dawn. We arrived in Tairua at 8:00 am, as we were driving through Tairua he said “lets go walk up the summit”. Now i'm all for a bit of a hike, but we’d just been driving for two hours it was 8:00am and freezing so i wasn't very keen at all. I just wanted a hot coffee and some breaky haha. Amway once again he persisted! So up the summit we went, not without a fair few complaints on my behalf either. We got to the top of the summit, it was the most beautiful clear winters morning. We were standing there admiring the view when Bryce turned to me and said “what's that down there” and pointed towards the ground. On the side of the cliff was a large rock which had a largely engraved message in it reading “ WILL U MARRY ME?” as i turned back around confused as to whether that message was for me or not, there Bryce was on one knee with a ring box in his hand and said “Brit, will you marry me?”. I was in shock and mumbled out a few confusing words/sounds before saying yes! It was the perfect proposal! That week Bryce had actually been working away up north in Ruakaka, he traveled a lot for work and he had taken that weekend off so we could go away for our anniversary. Little did I know, he had actually left Ruakaka on the Wednesday and traveled all the way to Tairua to prepare for the proposal, spent one day/night there organising everything and then drove back to Pukekohe on the Thursday and acted as though he had just travelled home from working away. I had no idea!

Our love story began…

Our Love story isn't your typical love story, it began in 2014. It was my first year out of high school, I was moving into a flat with three boys, one of which was a friend of mine from high school and the other two were just friends of my friend. This is where i met Bryce, we got along really well and became friends quite quickly. About three weeks in of living together, one night out after too many drinks at the pub we shared a drunken kiss or two and never looked back. We always had so much fun together, everything was always exciting. We made things official after a few weeks of seeing each other, but being so young, just met, living together and now newly boyfriend and girlfriend it was a lot all at once and definitely came with its challenges. We had many ups and downs but always seemed to come out the other side. In 2016 we surprisingly became pregnant at the ripe age of 20 and 21. Although this was extremely challenging and scary it made our relationship stronger and our bond unbreakable. We welcomed our baby girl Blake Isla in January 2017. Having Blake really cemented our relationship for the both of us, we now had a little family of our own and although it wasn't planned it was the best thing to happen to the two of us. We got engaged in June 2018 and married on the 12.12.19.

What were the highlights on the day:

Setting up our venue, although it was stressful i'm glad we did it ourselves because it looked exactly how i wanted it to look (im very particular) - it was so perfect. Having a beautiful relaxed morning with our bridal parties, Celebrating our special day with all of our nearest and dearest. One of most memorable highlights was the haka performed at our reception.

We splurged on….

Photography & videography of course!

We saved on….

We saved on food by having food trucks. It works out a heck of a lot cheaper than caterers, plus it was exactly the relaxed and fun vibe we were after. We also saved on planning and setting up our venue ourselves, sourcing and making a lot of our decor.

Do you have any tips for other brides & grooms?

Just have FUN! Weddings can quickly become quite stressful. Just remember why you're getting married and don't sweat all the small stuff. It's going to be the BEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE! I know everyone says that and it sounds so cliche but it truly is the best day!