I have a 4 foot tall healthy, thriving Saguaro, and I live in chicagoland.. It stays in the house in a southern exposure from October until June. It gets watered MAYBE 4 times during those EIGHT months! Once it goes outside, I water it about every 2-3 weeks in the summer, using a moisture meter as my guide. Plus, you must ALWAYS have the same side facing south, or they will burn and die..I mark my pot with a painted red dot, so I know to ALWAYS keep that side facing south..VERY IMPORTANT to NOT turn these guys.. You MUST keep these guys super dry in the fall/winter, and even in the summer, they can go awhile without water, even if its 90-100 degrees. They are like sponges; you can see them swell up when you water them, and you watch them start to shrivel up a bit the dryer they get. Remember, they are native to the Arizona desert, where they might get 4 inches of rain ALL YEAR..Overwatering will kill these guys, and that is what you did to your little guy..My 4 foot tall guy is in a 14 inch diameter pot, which is only a little bigger than they one you had your little fingerling in.

I second the suggestion for the dwarf nandinas - we have them in our south-facing front flower bed completely under the eave of the house, so they get next to no direct sunlight (and barely any water now that they are established) and are thriving. They're evergreen in our area and stay small (and are almost always available at Lowe's in the smaller sizes which are less expensive than the big ones. If you can stalk Lowe's and HD, they will clearance a lot of those types of things at the end of the season before they bring in the Christmas trees, so you can get a deal but I doubt you want to wait that long with the cat issues ... the skewers in your photo made me laugh - I can tell the situation is getting desperate!). You can see two dwarf nandinas directly in front of our windows in this picture - they're in the shade so look dark but in person they are kind of lime green and bright. I think nandinas alone might be kind of boring, but it depends on how "into" gardening you want to get as to how elaborate you might want to be. This first year as you wait for your shrubs to grow, you might want to plant some inexpensive annuals to fill in (coleus is a good one for shade and is pretty easy to grow from seed, although I've always done my seeds indoors in the early spring.) Golden moneywort is one of my favorite creeping perennial groundcovers, you don't need too many plants to get started and it will fill in and keep weeds down for you and it can get a little ratty in the winter but does stick around to some extent, so it's semi-evergreen. I'd add some seasonal foliage or flower interest with heucheras or variegated hostas. All those are in this picture with the hydrangea (which is definitely a thirsty beast!) I'd definitely add bulbs like daffodils that will bloom when there are no leaves on the tree. Lots of things can be divided from other gardens - do you know any gardeners in your neighborhood or do you walk your 'hood where you could maybe ask a gardening neighbor? If you end up wanting to go the liriope route (I do actually like monkey grass in a landscape, at my old house it edged all my beds, but it needs to be divided every few years to keep from taking over and it is physically hard to divide) for goodness' sakes don't buy any. Send me a message and you can bring your shovel to my house. I also would be able to share daffodils next spring - I'm not entirely sure where they all are this time of year. My hostas are still small and young (divisions from friends, all!) so I can't divide those yet, but I might have some other things to share if I walk around and look. Oh! And get some cat repellent. We had that problem when we moved into our new house about 12 years ago, with cats using our raised planter beds as a toilet, and I went to TLC for cat repellent - probably any nursery will have something like it. The kind I used smelled strongly like lemons and was a granule that came in a milk carton style container. You'd just shake it out over the soil and reapply every time it rained, and after a while the cats got the message. I dug out all the top 8 inches of contaminated soil and replaced it, but I am a germaphobe who tends to garden while gloveless. Then I planted new stuff and it filled in and the cats didn't come back.

I worry less about matching to the insides of your recessed lights than matching to other hardware around the home. What type of hardware do you have for your door knobs? Wht type of cabinet hardware did you choose? I have learned just because you have recessed lights, it looks nice to also put in a few table lamps for ambient or reading light as well as table decor. If you choose that, what type of finish do you see there? Personally, I mixed nickel and ORB/bronze in my house but was very careful--ORB/bronze was in the formal rooms (entry, living and dining), nickel is everywhere else. Just recently I put up a bronze drapery rod in my bedroom and I have nickel hardware. It goes better with the drapes and that is what it is closest to. Some people are sticklers for having all finishes matchy-matchy and others are OK mixing it up a bit. If your style is transitional, I think it's OK to mix it up a bit.

Thank you. I don't want the house to be gray and cold. I like that it feels warmer, even though I really don't care for any of it. The builder only offered a couple of options. I chose grey over beige walls and didn't like how cold the homes with all grey looked so the builder suggested these warmer options for everything else. None of the floor colors I posted with the cabinets are our options. They're all other brands and colors but it was all I could do with what I had at Lowes. I was hoping it could help me go in a direction - light, dark, warm, cool, brown, grey. I appreciate your insight about the darker floors. I hate our current light tile and really didn't want to get something even close to what is there now. My husband didn't want to pay extra for floors so we got the tile, it was all light. I was actually excited about them redoing the floors so I could get rid of the really light tiles. The light color was the lightest I could find when I was looking. I think a washed oak would look good and would be more timeless than grey. I just don't like light floors. I don't like the counters and if we don't sell, I want to rip them out. I wouldn't do that to try to match a floor. Ideally I'd like to change the counters, backsplash and cabinet colors. I really have my heart set on a pearl backsplash but it won't work with what we have now. Changing the kitchen colors is more for that than to match a floor. I definitely wouldn't change the kitchen for a floor. We bought the house 2 years ago so the builder doesn't have access anymore. No one can take photos in the house as we aren't there and I wouldn't feel comfortable giving a key code and having people in my home. Lowes has samples of our counter, paint, and cabinet colors but nothing that we can take with us to a flooring store. I ordered a sample of our counter but the piece I got was extremely brown and looked nothing like what's in our house. I need to narrow our colors down and order samples that we could take with us to Lowes but we're running out of time. They have to order the vinyl, take everything out of our home, repair the foundation, lay the new floors, and put everything back. They estimate we'll be out of the house 2-3 weeks. At this point, it looks like we'll miss 4th ofJuly and possibly the entire summer. I'm stressed. This needed to be done months ago. :(