"I was planing on growing it in a pot ... with a green house in the winter ..." "Because for my cactus soil i get cheap soil from lowes or homedepot throw in a bunch of prelite and rocks and a bit of food ... should that be fine?" Yeah, you definitely need to do some reading. : p Perlite and rocks will improve a fine soggy soil simply by leaving less space in the pot for water to occupy, but it's only marginally better than deliberately underpotting the plant. Long story short, any potting medium that forces a plant to drink or drown is bad, and most succulents will end up drowning. Might I ask which sorts of cactus you have at the moment? Some of them take bad soil better than others. I would recommend reading through as many of the 'gritty mix' topics as possible (more than once, and at intervals. There's a lot to take in), and also the one about growing trees in containers. The latter is less immediately applicable because cacti don't need aggressive rootwork to survive in a container, but it does explain the importance of roots to a plant's overall health. If a plant has weak roots, it's less able to deal with environmental stresses and pests. If one of these stressors finally overwhelms the plant, the blame will fall there and not with the plant itself even if it was the only one for miles around that succumbed.

I just posted this on someone else's thread but I wanted to say THANK YOU for helping me find my voice! And making progress! The granite guy came today and fixed the crack. You can't tell at all standing over it. I can see it when the sunlight is reflecting off of it, but also bc I was specifically looking for it. Anyone else would just see it as graining. Granite guy said it happened probably when the cabinet guy was hacking at the trim he had to remove bc it wasn't right. This I can live with. The cabinet guy showed up yesterday. The magnet he brought to fix door wasn't the right one. I started to show him which cabs had nails still sticking out and he said he'd check all of them. Then he said ok I'm done. I opened a cab and said the nails aren't finished, I thought you were going to finish them. He says,"Oh I didnt realize that you wanted me to do that." Really?Really? I guess he thought the splintered wood was fine? So then he says ok I'm done. I'm going to run to HD and get the magnet and be right back. Then I went to check his work. He missed cutting nails in 2 cab and didn't finish 3 others. Well...An 1 1/2 later he calls and says he got the battery but needed to go home and he'd come back tomorrow. I told him he missed more nails etc. And... he didn't come. But I do consider it a small victory he came at all. And lastly, I called the glass guy and said it was really driving me crazy everytime I look at it. He said he was going to call daltile to see if there was anything he could do, but if not, they would have to do it over bc it was their mistake. Yea! So I'll let everyone know how things turn out. I really don't expect to hear from cab guy. But, it's not the last he'll hear from me!

I want the best view from the room that I use the most. In my particular case, it is the kitchen and the dining room. We eat breakfast and dinner looking at Mt Rainier. We eat in the dining room every day, not just on holidays. We have been looking for a house for years. I have a view from the kitchen/dining and slightly less so from the LR. When we look at houses, many houses have the kitchen cut off from the view, often located in the back with a view to the backyard. Although the view from the LR is better that what I currently have from my kitchen, I always turn these house down. I can't imagine living in a house where I would not have the access to the view until we ate dinner and sat down in the living room, which is for 1 hour a day. Often, it is already dark when I am in the living room. No way will I trade my house with a view from the kitchen to a LR with a view. Maybe because I live with a view, I know what is important to me to use that view. The view is not just about what you see but about the sense of space that the vista gives you. It's often about the natural light that it brings in. I have that sense of space and openness nearly all moments that I am in my house. Clearly, houses with a view from the LR only sell just as easily as the ones with the kitchen view, it probably does not matter where the view is. Where we live, even the bedroom views are considered views on the listing and priced up accordingly... Not as much as the common room view, non the less a view.... What matters is that there is a view for folks that have not lived with a view before and want one in their new house. if you can, in a view property, it helps to open up the walls so that you have views through another room. Our friends' water front beach house has completely open floor plan. The back part of the house is elevated 1 or 2 steps. This allows the back part of the house to look through/above the front of the house. We have also done this. Our LR is elevated and look through the DR and kitchen.

Usafamomsq8, I am really pissed too - this being the nicest word I can print. I have saved a number of pages of gorgeous ikea hacked kitchens. It had been my plan to spend time at the ikeafans site to see what other ideas I might be able to incorporate that I hadn't already considered. We are two months away from the remodel and I am finalizing my layout. Obviously there was a financial reason they did this. I suspect that because people were buying cabinet fronts elsewhere they felt it was costing them too much money in lost revenue. I am sure they weighed the cost of litigation to lost dollars in sales and it made sense for them to close it down. I feel sorry for the couple losing the site they must have worked very hard to put together. Sadly, they are a multinational corporation and we are but ants at their picnic, so unless someone comes up with another idea, we have just been stomped on.