A registry to allocate money towards renovation items?

I probably did a bad job explaining it in the title, but I'm looking for a registry that will accept both US and UK credit cards and will allow us to gather money towards renovating our boat and finally building a permanent bedroom for us. But asking for money outright just feels tacky, so I want people to be able to "buy" us different pieces of the building process.

So on this ideal site, we would enter in all the different components, like "12 sheets of celotex insulation for £50/$70" or "one gallon of hull grease for £80/$100" or "one sliding door for £20/$30" and people will click buy and give the money to the site, and that money is the eventually transferred to us after the wedding so that we can go out and buy those things.

It's impossible trying to find registries or places online that stock all the weird and random boat-specific things we need, so I think this would be a way that people could feel they're involved without just us asking for money. We do not need any household items whatsoever, and we are extremely limited in the amount of holiday/flights we can take, and seriously, what we really need is to get the boat fixed up.

Does a place exist that could let us do this? I'd rather not have to resort to setting up a site ourselves with paypal buttons all over the place, eww.

ok I guess I'm all on my lonesome here, but in the interests of others searching for something similar at a later date, I eventually went with honeyfund.com because:

a) they're free (zero fees, their revenue is entirely from site ads)
b) they're completely customisable (I don't have to buy from a "retail partner")
c) they don't touch any of the money (it goes directly from the guests into our paypal account)

All of the above were really important to us and it's the only site we've found that ticked all three boxes. I must've researched at least 20+ sites and some of the fees that are being charged are downright disgusting (ourwishingwell.com charges 5% to the guests and then another %5 when you withdraw it!!). The only downside to honeyfund.com I've found is that it's only single currency - I've chosen to list everything in pounds so our American guests will have to either use xe.com or rely on Paypal's conversion rate in the final transaction.

If anyone would like to see our Work-in-progress registry, just PM me (and if you want to see the transaction process I can set up a test 1p item for you I suppose).

It sounds like you have come up with a very clever idea--I am glad you found a site that worked for you! Not planning a wedding ever again--- but love the idea!

Very cool. So glad you found something that should work for you!

oooh thanks for the update SP, I was just wondering about something like this, and was actually going to make Jake make one from scratch (which would take ages as the shoemaker's children always go without shoes, and the web developer's girlfriend always goes without websites!)

Although he  did a big affiliate site last year - http://www.mywishwand.co.uk/signup so maybe he could set up a site for us, and we'll get both the affiliate cash and the gift (Is that wrong? )

oooh thanks for the update SP, I was just wondering about something like this, and was actually going to make Jake make one from scratch (which would take ages as the shoemaker's children always go without shoes, and the web developer's girlfriend always goes without websites!)

Ha! Don't I know it! It took James AGES to make our wedding site (there's no way we were going to do our registry DIY with payment gateways and shop inventory and stuff, though)! It's only three basic pages and some Google Docs RSVP forms, but he's such a perfectionist... PM me if you want to see the site, we haven't sent out invites yet so it's still hush-hush.

Ha! Don't I know it! It took James AGES to make our wedding site (there's no way we were going to do our registry DIY with payment gateways and shop inventory and stuff, though)! It's only three basic pages and some Google Docs RSVP forms, but he's such a perfectionist... PM me if you want to see the site, we haven't sent out invites yet so it's still hush-hush.

Cool, I'd like to see it, if that's okay! Cross my heart I wont leak any details

Jake would spend a lifetime researching then using the most elegant solution he could in Sinatra and J-Query adding in as many affiliates and checkouts as his little geeky heart could find and spending hours making sure it had a brilliant, usable Admin area, and then not really do anything with the forward facing bit for ages <_<

We'd be celebrating our silver before it was done!

I think honeyfund will work really well for us, as we specifically want to do broken up little stuff like "Watersking lessons 2 @ £15" so people feel more involved in what they're donating to us (rather than it being a black hole of cash, which is a bit weird to ask people to gift to) , and then we'll take pics to send back in the Thank you notes. 

There's no point buying us stuff because we're moving and we have stuff

I think honeyfund will work really well for us, as we specifically want to do broken up little stuff like "Watersking lessons 2 @ £15" so people feel more involved in what they're donating to us (rather than it being a black hole of cash, which is a bit weird to ask people to gift to) , and then we'll take pics to send back in the Thank you notes. 

EXACTLY. My mom was really praising the registry when she had a look over our site, so I'm hoping if she didn't just see it as "give us money", then most other people won't either.

There's no point buying us stuff because we're moving and we have stuff

We're not even moving - we just have too much stuff and no rooms to put it in!

EXACTLY. My mom was really praising the registry when she had a look over our site, so I'm hoping if she didn't just see it as "give us money", then most other people won't either.
We're not even moving - we just have too much stuff and no rooms to put it in!

I really don't think they will, I think it's really cute and because it's broken down it avoids all the awkwardness of asking for money, it's very much like a raditional registry except instead of getting a toaster delivered you get some money to buy your own toaster (or hull grease!). Do you think it's worth doing a small secondary registry for older relatives?

I've been thinking about it ever since I saw this about a year ago and honeyfund is exactly what I had in mind - http://www.aboomba.com/wedding/

It really stuck with me as I'm obsessed with getting in on a start-up in a few years, it seemed like such a good idea (not that I'd use wedding money for that), but we'd really like to do some more travelling and money would be really helpful and I love the idea of people buying us an "experience" as a gift