Develop A Good Site Plan For Your Panelized Home

What this episode covers

Show Notes: Site plans and what is required to develop a good one.   Building department and Home Owner Association requirements.  Grading and topographical plans reviewed.  All interesting details to understand if you have a more sophisticated building department or complex building site. Transcript: Interviewer: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me, as he is for every episode, is the President and Founder of Landmark Home and Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new houses where they want exactly as they want across the nation and worldwide since 1993, Mr. Steve Tuma. Steve, how are you doing my friend? Steve Landmark: It’s another great day, another fun day helping customers design houses, build them and work with different details and today we were working on a project and where the customer wanted to know, “How does my house fit on the lot?” Interviewer: Right. Steve Landmark: It sounds kind of simple. But when you think about it, it’s like who has ever thought about that? Interviewer: And that falls under what? Site planning would you say? Steve Landmark: Yeah, I would say site planning. It’s an important thing and sometimes there’s technical details. You know, and generally smaller than the lot, a little more complex because it’s just harder to fit a lot more in a little space. But some nice big lots and mountain area, slopes and stuff. There’s a lot of details. But it’s important not just for the building department but also for your enjoyment of the home and the site. Interviewer: Well, just give me the basics. Talk to me like I’m a third grader. I mean how do I go about developing a site plan? Steve Landmark: Well, it’s kind of interesting because a lot of customers will know where they want to put a house or what the house looks like or if they own a land, they will be like, “Well, this is our spot and we’ve got a view of the sunrise or the sunset,” or “Hey, this is easy access to get out of the kitchen, run into the garage and go off to work.” Interviewer: Right. Steve Landmark: So whatever someone’s priority is, they generally have some general concepts. So the idea of setting it up for someone’s lifestyle is important. But it’s also good to make sure it fits the regulations and other things that are important for draining, accessing your garage, being able to make sure you can get on the porch roof. If you’re going to put a patio on the back, make sure that the ground is there. So it’s important stuff to review and understand because different houses fit on land different ways. Sometimes people send us a plan for a house with a big walkout basement and they’re telling us that they want to build it on a slab in Iowa. So we’ve got to make adjustments to the design to make sure that it will fit the land. But there’s – it’s kind of interesting. I’m initially talking about how do you fit it on the land. You know, does it flow? Does it work good? But some of these regulations that the building departments have, there will be different setbacks. So some areas you got to have a 10-foot front yard or 20 or 30-foot front yard. Some will say you have to have 10 on side yards. Some will say you have to have 20 total with the minimum of 8 on one side. So sometimes the interpretation is relatively simple. You just need to understand and then there’s also rear lot setbacks. So those are details that we can work with with customers to find out the building area, to make sure that the footprint of the house fits in there. So – and we can work with the finer technical details. Most building departments say the setbacks will go up to the side of the house, the wall of the house. We’ve had others say no, it goes to the overhang. Others say no, it’s to the farthest projection.