TWO short months ago, Jade Weedon and Lewis Collins found they had won a £12,000 wedding courtesy of the Echo after years of heartbreak.

The Basildon couple came out top in the vote for the Echo’s Win a Wedding competition and could not be happier.

Their wedding fund had been eaten into by costs for the funeral for Lewis’s mother and IVF treatment in their bid to start a family.

It meant, despite being engaged for six-and-a-half years in a classic childhood sweetheart relationship, they felt no closer to their big day.

However Jade, 25, said all the preparations had now been made for the wedding at the Park Inn Palace Hotel on August 22 – and the respective fitters, bakers and organisers could not have been more helpful in putting together her dream wedding.

She said: “Everyone has been absolutely fantastic.

They’ve really gone the extra mile to make sure we’ve got exactly what we wanted, which is amazing given they’re basically donating their services.

“I decided onamint green colour scheme, and it’s quite hard to get things in that colour, but they’ve gone to extreme lengths to try and get matches.

“They’re going to the wholesalers to get our flowers sprayed mint green.”

Jade and Lewis, 23, met when they were children on music sharing application BearShare, later known as iMesh.

Jade said: “He was 12 when we started speaking and I didn’t know you could chat with people at first, but then this message came up saying, ‘I like that’ and we started talking about music and realised we had the same interests.

“A few years later I realised I had feelings for him and we met up when he was 16 – we’ve not had a night apart since then.”

The heartache which meant the couple had not been able to get married sooner won over competition voters’ hearts but, sadly, tragedy has continued to dog the couple in the run up to their big day.

Jade said: “We’re very excited and everything’s going well but it’s been quite tough recently.

“I lost one grandad recently and my other grandad, who’s like my best friend, had a heart attack and is in hospital.

“We’re hoping he’s going to be well enough for our honeymoon in Mallorca in September, which is part of the package, because we’re taking the whole family.

“I’m really looking forward to it and we’re all going to need it.”