Show Notes:
Panelized home landscape design and how important it is to the health of the house in general.  Kit home landscape designing, lawns, gardens, they’re for more than just putting plants in. There are many other reason to choose certain landscaping over another. It’s not just the beautification of the property, but also functional, technical and safety that needs to be considered.
Transcript:
Interviewer: Hey, everybody, and welcome once again to the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me in the studio in his usual seat is the President and Founder of Landmark Home & Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want exactly as they want across the nation and worldwide for, what, 25 years now since 1993, and that would be Mr. Steve Tuma.
Steve, say hello to the listeners if you would.
Steve Landmark: Hello, home world.
Interviewer: Panelized Home Building world.
Steve Landmark: Yeah.
Interviewer: We – we’ve been having some fun with the last couple of podcasts, the last few. And I wanted to kind of get back on, you know, sort of on track as far just talking about some real basic problems, issues that people come up when building. And basically, just kind of go over what I believe, you know, a lot of the customers just have these questions that Landmark is fully qualified to answer. So if you’re ready, I’m ready.
Steve Landmark: Yeah, let’s do it.
 Interviewer: So I’d like to some – a couple of things I’ve written down. One of them, we haven’t talked a lot, in fact, hardly any of in all these podcasts about landscape design and how important that is to, you know, the health of the house in general. I mean, obviously, landscape designing, lawns, gardens, things like that, they’re – they should be for more than just, you know, putting plants in. There should be, in my opinion, there’s got to be another sort of reason why you might choose certain landscaping over another. Can we get into that a little bit?
Steve Landmark: Yes. It’s really interesting because I think when you talk about landscaping, people are like, “Oh, where do I put my Petunias, or the Tulips, where is my pine tree? Where is this? Where is that?” And there’s actually deeper reasons for landscaping. It’s not just the beautification of the area, but you got to watch a lot of landscaping. And I think all of us have heard all the fires in Colorado, the West Coast, and Canada, everywhere and these fires are getting bigger and bigger.
So a lot of landscaping is a design to make sure that emergency vehicles and – or emergency personnel can get to your house. So for example, you don’t want to build a house in a big forest that’s prone to fires and just have a hedgerow all the way around it so no one can get to your house.
Interviewer: Right.
Steve Landmark: So a fireman couldn’t get up there. So in a lot of those places, there’s a abatement procedure showing that you’ve got to have a certain distance between bushes, you can have certain plants or certain boulders, you know, so that our firemen has got to, you know, rock climb to get over to your house.
So in some of those areas, we’re able to work with people on their landscape design or site planning to make sure that the house conforms with the requirements for that area because it’s an innocent situation that people don’t realize. They might be like, “Hey, I want to put a row of apple trees across my front yard. Won’t it be beautiful or, you know, the cherry trees with all the blossoms in spring?” Well, if it stops the ability for people to get to your house, it could be an issue. So of course, that doesn’t apply everywhere. But everywhere, you know, the big forest fires is what I meant by that. But the – you still want to make sure that people can get to your house in case of emergency.
Interviewer: Mm-hmm.