GETTING THE FACING DIRECTION OF A HOME (Part IV)

Finding Your House’s Nine Energy Sectors. Where Is What?

 What you need:

• The house’s facing direction
• The layout (or floor plan) of the house*
• The Nine Palaces grid (or sectors) that you will draw
• A Highlighter pen (I suggest green, blue and pink as they are darker colors)

Note:* If you do not have a copy of the original construction layout of your house, try      your best to produce a layout yourself, by sketching it.

Now that you are ready, let’s find out where each energy sector is located in your house!

Superimposing the Nine Palaces (or nine sectors) grid on the house’s floor plan:

1. On the copy of the floor plan, write down the facing direction of the house on its facing side. Add an arrow pointing outwards. This is the reference direction.
   
   
2. Draw a square around the floor plan using a highlighter. Do your best to square off any irregular shape on the layout so that it fits inside the square. Also, try to keep the center of the layout aligned with the center of the square. The best way to do this is to find the center point of the square and the center point of the layout and align both. You don’t have to be exact, just get as close as you can.
   
   
3. Divide the main square into nine quadrants or nine equal in size smaller squares.
   
   
4. Refer to the information previously noted on the facing direction of the house (See step 1). Fill in the directions on all remaining quadrants. Each square represents a sector of the house and its corresponding direction. The center quadrant is known as the Central Palace or Center Sector of the house, and there is no direction to assign to it.

In the following page you will find examples for the instructions above.

What happens if you are faced with an elongated floorplan? Although it is not as undesirable as some other irregular types of building layouts, even though as simpler and as more square-shaped the home is, the better when it comes to Feng Shui. If I did not mention, Qi is flexible and can expand or retract as needed. In the case of an elongated property, Qi will be forced to “squeeze” in order to flow around it and into each of its nine energy sectors. Energy-wise, an elongated floorplan is not considered the worst of the cases compared to some other much more complicated layouts. However, it depends on how elongated it is. The concern is that Qi (or energy) is a living thing and as such, it likes to move freely to be at its best.

Below is the example of an overly rectangular or an elongated home layout. I am going to demonstrate next the best possible and most acceptable way to superimpose the Nine Palaces grid over it. 

Let’s make the Ranch style floorplan shown above a North facing home. The method used to lay the Nine Palaces grid over the floorplan is the best approach to comply with the teachings of Feng Shui. All sectors are given the opportunity to enjoy a fair or equal share in space within the grid, in a harmonious way.

However, in the case of this irregular floorplan, most sectors end up missing! This is critical, especially if the missing sector happens to be either the North or the South sector and in the example on next page, both of them are missing! The reason why we don’t want to see any of these two sectors missing is because they do not have any other sector of the same element to serve as “backup”. If you go through the reference table on the Five Elements in Feng Shui that is included in this book on page# 19, you will notice that the only elements that are alone in the house’s Ba Gua map are the element Fire (South) and the element Water (North). The remaining elements have each their counterpart and this can be helpful if one of them is missing or weak in a home.

Go to Part V for the next set of steps.