Spring Break? More like Spring Busy!

We've been bizy beavers as usual around here!  A few weeks ago, when the weather was starting to turn good, Matt came home and told me he was going to paint the shed that weekend. He was all geared up to get painting, then it snowed. But snow doesn't stop him, nothing stops him once he's put him mind to it! 

Here is the before of the shed in the corner. It also doubles as Shaiya's pent house.

 And here is the after of the shed. He even re-roofed the entire thing! Matt literally did everything while I was at work, I didn't lift a finger on this project.  I don't call him my Boy Toy for nothing!

In other news, Matt turned the big 24! We had quite the celebration! I love love love to spoil Matt. I knew I wanted to buy him a bike for his birthday, and so did he. He just kept telling me how much he wanted a bike for his birthday. But I also couldn't help my self from buying him a few other things, I think I may be addicted to buying things for Matt. 

Here he is with all his presents. Yes, I bought him a steam mop. Yes, I want him to do all the mopping. And yes, he loved it. I also got him a remote control helicopter. He was giddy with excitement about it. He broke it  2 days later. But it lasted 2 days longer than I thought it would.

His dinner request was steak. He only wanted steak. So steak it was! He couldn't stop talking about how much he loves steak. 

He also got his weight in candy, from me and from my family. He loves candy! The candy was gone in less than a week.

Last week was Matt's spring break, it wasn't really a break for him since we spent the majority of the week trying to fit a couch in our basement. But we did get away to St. George and Vegas for a few days. 

The first night we got to hang out with S&J and G-baby. 

It's weird that neither Scott or Jen have blue eyes... and Matt's eye's look just like Gracie's. So weird....

We played some killer frisbee at a park for a while.

Then we went on a sweet bike ride.

We hung out with this guy for a while in Vegas. He was a hoot!

  We got poured on while we made the 2.5 mile speed walk back to our hotel.

Even though the weather wasn't the best, we still had a lot of fun!

 I'll be finishing up our family room this weekend (hopefully)  and Matt has huge plans for the backyard (I'm hoping none of them involve me helping out). We'll post pics once we're all done!

A built-in bench? Nah, just a regular bench!

Matt has this amazing ability to build things exactly how I pictured it in my head. I will just explain some crazy idea to him and he'll buy all the necessary items and cut and measure it exactly. He's basically a genius. Any way, this project was no exception to Matt's geniusness. I wanted a built in bench for our table. It was going to be so cool, a huge bench built into the wall. But Matt didn't like the idea of scooting to get out of the bench every time you have to get up. So we just decided to build a free standing bench. 

Here's the boy toy doing all the work while I take pictures. 

While working on the bench we had a creeper watching us. She likes to just sit and peek in the window while we work. And she usually has a real big creeper look on her face.

 Typical Matt pose. 

 Here's the bench before the stain and paint. 

 Here's the bench after all the stain and paint!

   And here's the bench with the table. 

It's not as cool as a built in bench (maybe in my next house), but it's still pretty amazing! Matt did such a good job! 

Sneak Peek

 Here is a sneak peek of what we are working on this weekend! I'm excited and pumped and exhausted just thinking about it. Good thing I have a boy toy, aka Matt, to do all the work while I do the fun stuff, like staining!

Dumb Dumb

Isn't she adorable?? This is our pup Shaiya, pronounced Shy-a. Matt picked out the name and the spelling. Anyway, lately whenever we get home and she notices we are home and haven't given her attention, she will start barking. Matt gets annoyed at her, so he'll say things like " Shut up Dumb Dumb" or when it's raining outside and she is just sitting out getting wet he'll say " Go in your house Dumb Dumb". Every time it makes me laugh super hard. I don't know why, maybe it's because Matt sounds like he is 5 years old when he says it.


She loves peanut butter....

Wainscoting

Since we moved in we've done a lot of work to our house! One of the projects that I was most excited about was the wainscoting in the kitchen. Last summer Matt and I went to the Parade of Homes and saw tons of cool wainscoting/board and batten. I've also seen it done a few times on blogs, and wanted to do it myself! Here is the before picture of our house before we bought it. Super ugly and super gross. 

Here is our during picture of the wainscoting. My amazing husband worked so hard on it while I was at work, and all I had to do when I got home was paint. He also likes to pose in pictures acting like he is hurt. His acting skills are phenomenal, I hope you didn't believe that he was actually hurt!

Here is the after picture of the wainscoting.

 I love how it brightens up the whole kitchen. I love it! We did the wainscoting a few months ago, so the pictures are a little out dated with our tiny old table.  But I'm too lazy to go take a new picture with our table, you'll just have to imagine it. 

Farm House Table... Kirk Style.

I don't like to brag, but Matt and I are pretty much awesome at recreating other people's ideas and acting like  it was our idea.  I will stalk blogs and pinterest for weeks looking for the perfect project for us. Then I will tell Matt my crazy idea, and he figures out how to make it possible. I like to think that I am crafty and handy, but really I am just cheap and I hate paying for things that I think I can make.

My latest and greatest obsession was a farm house table. I originally saw the farm house table on one of my favorite blogs. Ever since then I couldn't get it out of my mind, I wanted that farm house table and I wanted it now.  It looked so easy to make, so I assumed I could do it! And for Christmas Matt gave me a coupon book stating that he will help me with any crazy projects I can come up with. That put me over the edge to start the project immediately! My parents had give us an old table a few months back that I knew would be perfect for the project.

The table definitely needed some love. It's previous owner, Eric, did some real damage to it. Don't mind the horrible quality of pictures. I was sanding, so there is dust in the air. Here is the before...

The during picture...

Here is the after.

 We tried not to match the stain to the floor, but it ended up matching it almost identically. 

The table turned out even better than I had imagined it! I love it!!

San Fran, Man

We decided to go to San Francisco for our 2 year anniversary! We didn't really get a summer vacation this summer, because we were too busy with our house. So the trip was a summer vacation/anniversary/Christmas presents to each other. We started out the trip stopping in Sparks, NV to visit Alissa!

This is just us taking some pictures in the parking lot. 

Alissa was a great hostess and had a bunch of games for us to play. One of the games was "pretty pretty princess". The name of the game pretty much explains itself. As hard as I tried, Matt still beat me and he was very proud of it. 

 The next morning Alissa took us to the marina across the street. It must have been duck mating season, because there were tons of ducks. And I mean TONS. We spent a good half hour herding the ducks into a corner and watching them frantically try and get away.  Here's Alissa frolicking through the ducks.

From Sparks its about a 4 hour drive to San Francisco. When entering California they make you stop and they check your vehicle for fruit.  When the ranger inspected our cooler for fruits I just played it cool saying that I don't eat much fruit. Little did he know that I had a cooler stashed with fruits  hidden in the backseat! We fooled him! We probably would have been arrested if the California Forest Services knew! 

We got a little lost driving into the city, but we saw a bunch of cool views!

Our first day in San Francisco we took a walk down to the pier for dinner. We ate at this amazing restaurant called Pier 23 Cafe. It was on "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives", so it's legit. And if Guy Fieri likes it, then I like it.  The restaurant was right on the water and had some amazing views! It was too dark to take good pictures, but trust me, it was cool just like Guy Fieri.

On Sunday we wanted to repent of our sins, for breaking the law and bringing illegal fruit into the state, so we went to church. There was a church building not to far from our hotel, but I was in heels and I refused to walk. So we ended up parking just as far as our hotel was from the church. Not really, but it seemed like that.  At church we sat behind a typical Mormon family. They had about a dozen children to keep us entertained through all of Sacrament meeting. One of the kids, in particular, had a bunch of snot all over his face and he would scrunch up his nose and make the weirdest face I had ever seen. I don't know what it was, but that snot nose kid made me laugh so hard, I haven't laughed that hard in months! But he made me laugh during the Sacrament, so I was trying so hard to keep my laughs quiet. And the snot nose kid just kept egging me on. He wouldn't stop looking at me making that weird snot nose face. Eventually I got my cool back and tried to act like nothing had happened.  Matt was embarrassed by me, the whole ward probably thought we were crazy. 

After church we went to the Golden Gate bridge. It was pretty cool. We took a thousand photos, because these are the kinds of pictures I get with Matt. His photo patience is very thin.

He also likes to do his "cartoon smile", which is his fake smile. 

"We've been married 2 years!"

We found this cool dock under the bridge. There were a few people fishing for crabs. It was super fun to watch them pull up a basket full of crabies. This cool guy was just chilling out on the dock.

The crab fishing lured in a curious sea lion. Matt was ecstatic, he loves sea lions.  We had  a ton of fun watching him swim around in the water. We found a star fish in the shallows of the tide, so we picked it up and took a few pictures. There were a bunch of weird guys watching us from up above on the dock and they kept laughing at us. I guess we looked pretty stupid or somethin'.

Walking the street at night, we found this man just painting away with his mouth! Crazy! I wanted to stop and watch him do his thang, but Matt felt bad since we didn't have any cash to give him. So we hurried away. 

We spent hours watching the sea lions on the docks. By far the best part of the trip!

We are 90's kids, so we tried to reenact the opening scene of full house while at the park in front of the Full House house. We were unsuccessful.

We visited the Oakland temple and afterwards experienced first hand how ghetto Oakland really is.

We drove down Lombard street. There weren't any parking places within miles, so Matt slowed down the car enough so I could jump out and take a picture. Mission accomplished.... kinda.

We saw more sea lion mustaches. 

There were plenty of sea lion snobs.

 Came close to peeing our pants at 6 flags.

Typical Matt picture.

We drove an hour for Jelly Bellys. And it was worth it.

Spent the day at Alcatraz island. Learned some good ways to escape prison if I ever find myself in that situation.

Ate super rich and yummy (and super expensive!) sundaes at Ghiridelli Square.

Watched some sea lion shows. 

There are just about a thousand more pictures I could post here, but I don't want to bore you with all of them. The trip was a blast! We had a ton of fun!