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: We’ve done a lot of remodeling in the past at our house, including redoing our kitchen, but now we want to expand the size of our house, maybe add a couple of bedrooms. How do we go about hiring someone to do the job and how do we find out what we want to do?
ANSWER: I’d suggest hiring a design-build contractor, and probably you should interview at least three contractors separately before you hire someone. Invite them to come to the house one at a time. Keep track of who’s on time for the meetings.
When you have that first meeting with each of them, have the contractor tour the house and discuss what you think you want to do. But have them tell you how they would fix what doesn’t work well in your home. If someone asks you what your budget is, don’t tell them. Instead tell them you want to talk about the project you’re interested in and you want a range of how much it might cost — between X dollars and Y dollars, for example.
You should also meet with them by going to their offices to see how they operate and how organized they are. You’ll want to know whether yours will be the only job they will take on or will they have a couple going on at the same time. The third time you should meet them at one of their job sites or a house they worked on recently. Then you ask the homeowner a lot of questions, like: did the contractor show up on time and how did they handle problems that came up.
In the end, you want to pick someone that you have the most confidence in, the person that you want to work with when things don’t go as planned. After all, there are always going to be things that come up unexpectedly.
Q: I live in Green Valley, and I have a loquat tree that’s about 20 years old. I’d like some suggestions for how to take care of it, especially during the summertime when it seemed to suffer some damage. It’s looking pretty bad right now but seems to be coming back. One problem I have is that I’m not here in the summertime.
A: Loquats are native to China and can produce juicy apricot-like fruit. They’re beautiful ornamental trees and are drought resistant, but don’t like our hot, dry summer weather. They really suffered last year in Arizona. In your case, start by putting a good layer of compost or mulch around the tree — a layer that’s about 2-3 inches deep. Do that before you leave, and before the summer arrives. You could use a sunscreen fabric to put over it, but that might not work in your case. Be sure to fertilize the tree this spring and again in the fall with citrus food or chicken-type fertilizer. It does need moisture in the summer. So, hopefully, you can provide water through your irrigation system in case the monsoon doesn’t produce much rain.
Q: I have a yellow bell shrub that I bought about a month ago. It was doing fine and was even flowering. Then the flowers fell off and the leaves started looking yellow. My neighbor told me I was watering it too much. That’s because I watered every day with the hose and filled up the basin around the tree.
A: It does sound as if you were watering too much. You probably only need to water once a week. The flowers falling off is a part of its natural cycle, however, so don’t worry about that.
