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Which home should I choose?
Put in the real addresses you are deciding between and they come back ranked across seven layers — the floor plan, the facing direction, the location, the house number, the floor, the postcode and the move-in date — scored for every person who will actually live there. Whether you are renting or buying changes the weighting, because it changes what you can still fix later.
The seven layers, in order of what matters
Most house-number sites read one layer and imply it is the whole tradition. It is the smallest of the four, and we would rather be useful than flattering about the one people expect.
- The floor plan
- Four yes-or-no questions you can answer in thirty seconds with the plan in front of you: does the front door line up straight through to a rear opening (穿心煞), is a kitchen or bathroom in the centre of the plan (中宮), does a bedroom share a wall with a bathroom, does the door open onto stairs. Weighted heavily, because the layout is structural and a classical practitioner would spend most of their time here.
- Facing direction
- Which way the front door looks. In classical feng shui this is the single most important thing about a building, and your Kua number gives you four favourable directions and four to avoid. It carries the most weight here.
- Location
- Your astrocartography lines projected onto the address. A Moon or Venus line near a home is read as somewhere that feels like living; a Saturn or Pluto line is read as heavy going. Needs a birth time — the lines cannot be placed without one.
- House number
- The digits, reduced and read against your Lo Shu grid and Day Master. Real, and the smallest of the four — no classical text weighs the number on the door.
- The floor
- Read the same way as a house number, with one addition: a floor containing a 4 is flagged, because 四 sounds like 死 and many buildings skip those floors entirely. If the lift buttons skip four, the physical fourth floor is still the fourth floor.
- Postcode
- The digits of the postcode or ZIP, read as their own layer and weighted lightly — a postcode covers a great many homes, so it says more about the area than about the address.
- Move-in date
- Read from the Chinese almanac for 入宅, entering a home to live in it, and 移徙, the move itself. Weighted more heavily on a short rental, where it is the only part the tradition really addresses.
Why two people can need different front doors
Eight Mansions splits everyone into an East group and a West group by their Kua number, and the two groups favour opposite halves of the compass. East group wants north, east, south-east and south; West group wants west, north-west, north-east and south-west. There is no overlap.
So a couple or a houseshare split across the two groups will never find a door that is favourable for everyone, and any site telling you otherwise is averaging the problem away. This page names it instead: where residents disagree sharply about a home, it says who and by how much, and the traditional remedy is to give the person the direction suits least the bedroom that faces their own best direction.