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. Here are questions about home maintenance and improvement from the Southern Arizona area.
Q: The exterior of my 5,000-square-foot home was built from Rastra foam blocks covered with a mixture of concrete and stucco. Because of these blocks, it’s a very quiet house, and this building technique provides great insulation. But now the coating is beginning to have random spider cracks plus some cracks that follow the edges of the blocks. How can I fix this?
A: Rastra is a great insulator and can help keep down your air conditioning costs in summer in the Arizona desert. It’s a European building technology that has become popular in the western United States. It’s also rodent-proof and termite-proof. The blocks come in different sizes and can easily be cut with woodworking tools to form the desired shape.
However, the type of cracking you describe is fairly common with these types of blocks and you need to consult an expert painter who has worked with these types of surfaces before. The right painter can help you find the right kind of covering to put on your walls to decrease the chance that the cracks will reappear.
Q: I have a tree planted near a wall that stands between my yard and a neighbor’s yard. Its roots are beginning to lift up the wall, and someone suggested that I should cut off some of the roots on top of the soil to prevent further damage to the wall. I did that, but now I’m wondering if the tree will die.
A: Since it is an established tree, the pruning of those roots probably will not damage the tree. If problems continue, you may want to call a tree service to work on removing some of the roots.
Something to remember is that when planting a tree near a house or a wall or any part of your hardscape, you can put down a vertical root barrier — a hard plastic modular device about two or three feet long inserted in the ground between the tree and the wall. When roots run into this barrier wall, it “encourages” them to grow down instead of into your fence walls.
It can also be inserted into the ground after a tree is growing, but it’s not easy to do then.
Q: I have a flat foam roof on my house. This roofing material has been up there for many years. Now I want to clean and recover it. Is it possible to walk on the foam and do this job myself?
A: If the basic foam coating is still in very good shape, you can clean it by brushing it with a power broom and picking up the debris. Then recoat it with a roofing elastomeric coating. However, if your roof is as old as you say, you can’t just put that elastomeric coating over the top of it. You would have to remove all of the old foam and have it replaced. That would be a very difficult job to do by yourself.
Now is the time to contact a qualified foam roofing company and have them come to your home, do a complete inspection and give you a report as to the condition of your roof and their recommendations for appropriate repairs.
