Each year, thousands of Arizona residents email or call Rosie Romero's radio show with questions about everything from preventing fires in their chimneys to getting rid of tree roots invading their sewer system.His goal is to provide answers that suit the specific lifestyle wherever someone lives in Arizona.
QUESTION: I have a house that was built in the 1970s and that has a flat roof with a small parapet wall around it. Can I have a pitched roof put on top of the flat roof? Do homeowners ever do that?
ANSWER: Yes, you can do it. Probably you want to have one part of the roof slope toward the front of the house, and the other half sloping toward the backyard. The main objective in this kind of remodel is to find the load bearing walls where you can build the trusses. You’ll want to insulate inside, under the new roof and then you may be able to use that area for storage. What you need to do first is have a remodeler come out and tell you how the work could be done.
Q: I was trying to install an outside light and accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong place on the smooth stucco exterior finish of my house. So now I have a 1-1/2-inch diameter hole to fill. What can I do to fill it so it’s not visible?
A: It’s going to take some extra effort to make a hole that big “invisible” after it has been drilled into smooth stucco that doesn’t have some texturing. You need to start by plugging the hole with a dry, powdered product that you can buy at the hardware store. Mix the powder with a little water and fill the patch with the mixture. Then let it set and dry for a couple of days until the mixture cracks at the edges where the mixture and the stucco meet. Fill it again going six to eight inches out beyond the hole and let it dry again. Then smooth out the area. Finally, you will roll elastomeric stucco caulk over the area and let it set. Then you can repaint the stucco.
Q: My two-story house has stucco on the bottom and sheets of fiberboard siding on top. Lately, the sheets of siding have been pulling away from the seams where nails are holding them in place. Could it be because of a leak problem that’s causing the sheets to swell? And how can I fix this?
A: It may just due to a lack of paint on the siding walls. You definitely want to control this problem or you could end up with serious damage to the house. Have a paint company come out to assess the problem with the siding. It’s possible you could stop it by resecuring the loose siding, caulking all the joints and nail holes and then putting a good coat of 100 percent acrylic paint on the exterior of your home.
Q: We recently got a quote for $5,400 for putting energy-savings paint on the ceilings inside our home. We have an 1,870 square-foot house that has no attic so we can’t upgrade the insulation in the attic. But we thought that possibly painting the interior ceilings could help reduce our utility bills in the summer. What do you think?
A: There is no such thing as “energy-saving” paint for use inside homes. That $5,400 quote would be a complete waste of money. Even if you could save 2 percent of your bill every month, you would never get your money back on this expensive paint job.
