By five months prior to your wedding week in Ireland, you should have booked your rental house or guest lodging.

Now that you know where you’ll be staying for the week, you know how many bodies it can sleep! Firm up the numbers with the guests on your shortlist. Naturally, try to fit them all on the same property. However, we made sure our guests were aware of 1 particular rule:

Only the guests who can spend most of our wedding week with us were secured a room on the property. If any guests chose to come for only 2 or 3 days, they had to secure their own lodging offsite.

Luckily, all of our guests were able to stay for most of the week with us. But not everyone understood this rule, at first. We needed to explain our reasoning with a few folks, quite delicately so as not to sound rude.

You see, we’ve rented this great property in Ireland for 1 week, but it can only sleep so many. As a result, we’d had to chop down our guest list and not invite everyone we wanted to. Some very close relatives and long-time friends were not invited because of limited space. So, anyone who does come, they need to understand that every empty bed in the house is precious and could have been reserved for someone else more available. (And more willing to spend a beautiful week with us on a most-expenses-paid vacation!)

You don’t want to sound like a douchebag, so this needs to be explained delicately to your guests.