Lately we have made a bunch of small changes (and some BIG ones that I will post about later) to the house and the car.

First, we finally got our Hawaiian plates! We actually got them last week right when we came home from Chicago. In Hawaii, when you ship a car over, you have 30 days to register your car to Hawaii and change your plates over. We really waited until the very last second to get them because we did not realize that we needed a safety check on the car before you can register it - so we had to get that done first. They are done now though! And on the Jeep - it is so exciting to have our rainbow plates!

Another update we have been doing is painting almost every room. It has been slow going because some of the rooms are huge, some need to be sanded first because the paint below had too much sheen and wouldn't take the new paint, and I have also had a change of heart on colors a couple times...

Here are some befores and afters of our different rooms. Some of the paint colors are hard to see because I am just taking the pictures with my iphone - sorry!

Before - This is the first guest room (where Ashley is currently staying). It was painted in a bright blue. It wasn't that bad, but it made it hard to decorate so we wanted something a little lighter.

After - We ended up painting it a light gray/blue.

Before - This is the bathroom attached to both of the guest rooms. It was a BRIGHT blue as you can see in the pics.

After - We decided to paint it a pinky beige. Although it is more pink than I expected, it does look really nice with the wood and the new shower curtain I bought from World Market.

Before - This is the master bedroom. The walls were also bright blue (the previous owners really liked blue) and the ceiling was a light wood and the floor was a dark wood.

After- We stained the ceiling to match the floors more closely and we painted the walls the same gray/blue as the first guest room. We hope to get crown molding in here eventually too!

Before - The kitchen and the living room used to be different colors even though they flow from one to the other. Also, the living room had darker beige trim and light beige walls. We wanted to invert that and have the whole house unified with white trim.

After - So we painted the living room and kitchen in a brownish/beige (called "comforting" by Behr) and painted the trim white. I would have included a full living room shot but we aren't done painting it yet!

The paint is still wet and it is hard to keep bruce from laying against the walls! He did not like the bath he had to take after this...

And our last, but CERTAINLY not least update is that we finally got a dishwasher put in! It was pretty complicated for our contractor because there were no hookups and he had to drill through a bunch of cabinets to add the right plumbing. But here it is!! We got a Samsung DMT 800.

Isn't she beautiful!? This dishwasher is pretty much my dream dishwasher. It has all of the features I wanted (an extra big interior, movable racks, energy star, quiet etc) and it has a special spot for putting crusty casserole dishes that it washes extra hard and you don't even have to pre-soak! The best feature though is that it has a built in garbage disposal so you (supposedly) don't have to scrape your plates before putting them in. I will report back and let you know if it really does that though because it seems too good to be true!