Remember how the home furnishings and remodeling business was finally supposed to rebound in a big way this year? Forget about it. The long-anticipated recovery stubbornly refuses to show up on the retail landscape, and new financial results from the home improvement twins—Home Depot and Lowe’s—indicate you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it.

Even as Lowe’s clearly outperformed its larger rival this past fiscal quarter, each giant took down its forecast for the remainder of its financial year, now indicating flat-at-best results for their businesses. The rest of the retail picture remains wildly inconsistent. Walmart—the biggest of the big boxes—continues to put up exemplary numbers, while its largest competitor, Target, remains mired in self-inflicted dire straits, its sales falling in red-ink territory.

Down the highway, the TJX juggernaut, particularly its HomeGoods and Homesense brands, is putting up numbers the rest of the retail world salivates over. Williams-Sonoma also is running counter to the overall picture, recently reporting strong numbers across its entire financial statement and, like TJX, being relatively positive about what’s to come.

But the twins tell us the most about the state of the remodeling industry and what it means for suppliers, interior designers and competitors in the short term—and perhaps in the longer run as well. The differences between the two brands are striking. As happens relatively rarely, it is Lowe’s where the news is better. It boosted sales 3.2 percent, including a slight bump (0.4 percent) on comps. Online sales were up 11.4 percent. It did take a little hit on the bottom line—off 4.7 percent on net income—but it attributed that to two big recent acquisitions.

Lowe’s said its results could have been even better if homeowners were in a buying mood. CEO Marvin Ellison told CNBC that, even though its customers’ personal finances are OK, they “are not immune to the media cycle.” Tariffs and the just-ended government shutdown are not doing much to convince consumers that they need to jump into a big, expensive renovation at the moment.

But the results out of Lowe’s certainly looked better than across the street at Home Depot, where comp store sales were only up 0.2 percent, and even though overall sales increased 2.8 percent, that came largely from its big acquisition earlier this year. Importantly, it missed analyst forecasts for the third straight quarter, something it doesn’t usually do even for one quarter.

Like his Lowe’s counterpart, Home Depot CEO Ted Decker blamed a consumer reasonably unsettled about the overall economy. “Uncertainty and continued pressure are disproportionately impacting demand,” he said. Both retailers also mentioned the dirty little secret of the home improvement business: A lack of major weather events like hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes is impacting money that would be spent on rebuilding homes and businesses.

The two had one other thing in common: taking down their forecasts going forward. Lowe’s said it expects comp store sales to be flat year over year compared with its forecast from August in the flat to plus-1 percent range. Home Depot was similarly pessimistic about the short-term, but seemed to offer a bit more optimism longer-range. “Can The Home Depot grow? The answer is yes,” Decker said on the company’s earnings call Tuesday morning. “Will the industry have some shorter-term pressures with turnover in home price? Yes, as well.”

All of which means the turnaround for the home business will be just around the corner. That’s the next corner, not this one.

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Warren Shoulberg is the former editor in chief for several leading B2B publications. He has been a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; received honors from the International Furnishings and Design Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology; and been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media as a leading industry expert. His Retail Watch columns offer deep industry insights on major markets and product categories.