Check out Hitachi and others. They have a remote condenser, and in room evaporators. Great for a retro fit.

I'm not a roofer, but my few experiences with foam roofs doesn't make me want one. No doubt the specialized equipment & experience are important. I thought they had fallen out of favor as a roofing system. I've only ever seen them on large commercial/institutional roofs. Why not use a more conventional system like BUR or EPDM membrane & put down rigid insulation before reroofing. The extra thickness of the roof with insul. will require more work & cost because of reworking the edges(fascia & gutters, etc), but should be worth it in energy savings & comfort. The foam would have the same costs associated with it. Find a roofer that is comfortable using whatever system you go with. Why try to teach an old roofer new tricks. Install the hatch before the reroofing. A roofer should be able to do that although the finish work inside might be best left to someone else.

Thanks so much parker25mv! Looks like we're both on the same page. I'm not planning on planting them in the ground, and I agree that they're too dominant in LA right now. When I was trying to find a suitable screen plant I read through all of the ficus discussion on here and decided against them. Then these fell into my lap, which opens up budget for native CA plants elsewhere so I'm trying to make lemonade. I'll leave them in the half-barrels, but I'm also open to any suggestions to make them healthier. Root pruning has been suggested above, which I'm looking into now. Thanks!

I would NEVER recommend using reform cabinets. I am a designer and ordered these for a client. After 17 weeks (the promised lead time was 14-16 weeks) we got the cabinets. Had the order come in accurate it wouldn't be a big deal that it was 1 week late. Unfortunately, they didn't come in even close to accurate and we have had to go back and forth multiple times to get the additional pieces that were either missing or incorrectly sized. It has now been 6 months since we placed the order and still don't have all of the missing or incorrect pieces. The customer service rep has told us multiple times that remaining pieces will be "completed next week" 3 times now and they have failed to meet the deadline twice. If they actually ship next week as told, we will have spent hours on phone calls and waited over 6 months to get the kitchen to be delivered accurately and completely.