Q&A Sunday: Laying a Bagua with Multiple Outside Doors
Thank you for your Holistic Spaces podcast. I’m enjoying it very much. I have a bungalow built in 1919 in South Minneapolis with multiple doorways entering the space. Here is my question: using the floor plan provided, how would you lay the bagua on my home?
Alida, Minneapolis, MN
Door #1: From the sidewalk, a walkway leads up to the deck. If you enter through the steps and deck railings, you are facing east and the front windows.
Door #2: On the deck, you have to turn to face north to actually enter the house. This is the door with a deadbolt.
Once inside that room, you’re in a 3-season porch. Half the year it’s my “sun room” and half the year it’s an unheated “mud room.”
Door #3: To enter the main house, you turn to face east again and walk through another door to enter the living room. I believe this is the original door to the house and that the sunroom was added later. (It has an uncharacteristically large closet and lots of outlets!)
Door #4: a sliding glass door from the kitchen to a back deck.
There is a roof over the porch. I’m attaching a photo of the house and the front door from the yard.
Door #2 leads from the porch into the main house. The porch does not have heating ducts, so it feels separate from the main house. #2 faces the street, albeit through the porch.
Hi Alida!
Thanks for all this. All the doors can be (understandably) confusing as to how to layout the bagua. People get stumped by this type of situation frequently. First of all, the qi of the home looks very lush. There is a sense of seclusion. Doors represent the mouth of the inhabitants, therefore the main door is called the “Mouth of Qi.” The mouth of qi determines how qi enters your home.
Door #2 is indeed the main door, or what we call in feng shui, the Yang door. It’s what the official front door is. So you would lay the bagua as shown here where half of your home is outside the bagua.
Door #1 is a yin door. It’s not really a door, but it is a portal.
Door #3 is another yin door. I understand you were probably hoping #3 was the yang door.
Door #4 is a back door and can be a yin door if you use this frequently to enter the home (maybe the garage is back there).
In regards to a yin door, you can place a secondary bagua using doors 1 & 2, to glean more insight on your situation.
A practitioner may be able to assist you in how to effectively use the yin bagua layouts to support you further. For instance if you do a bagua adjustment, you can do it on your yang layout, a yin layout, and on your bedroom layout.
With a space that has multiple doors, laying a bagua can be confusing, but it can always be done! My first recommendation of course, for accuracy, is to enlist the help of a feng shui professional. If you would like to make adjustments on your own, I would recommend using the bagua I've laid here or laying the bagua on separate rooms of your home.
Please do reach out if you decide to lay the bagua on your own and have additional questions!