Following the Dreams...: Building Our Future Home

Our land is quite far from Colombo to drive daily. It is around 50km away from where we living in Colombo. There are two routes that we can take. The Low level Road via Kaduwela and Hunwella is the shorter route which is around 47km. The road is quite narrow, but takes a long time to go due to slow moving traffic. The High Level road is the longer route which is around 55km to the land. The road is wide and carpeted and traffic moves smoothly. I love to drive in this route. The story does not end from there.

The Debegama - Napawala Road is not motorable. We have to walk along this hilly road nearly one kilometer. The villagers have concreted half of of the road with the help of the local authority. But still, nearly a 500m long section of the road is left which is not motorable. Due to the absence of side drains, rain water flows along the muddy road surfacing rocks and forming ridges in the middle. Walking along this difficult road is a daunting task. We have to walk 200m more along our private road to go to the Estate. The 12ft wide private road is ours and it was previously used to transport rocks from the quarry operated in our Estate.

Building a house was not in our plans. We first thought of renting out a house nearby. But the old house that we found was infested with various kinds of insects including few types of ants. I am afraid to keep my five year old son, Ewan; in the insects infested, muddy, cold and soggy old house. We really don't want to sleep on the bare floor and walk in the wet and muddy floor after hard works of a long day. My mom complains all the time about ants and rat infested kitchen that has a leaky roof. After thinking hard, I decided to build a house for us.

First we thought of using the half built concrete structure to form a one bedroom house with bare minimum facilities. But we found that the old structure was in ruin. We want our house to be cozy, warm and comfortable place for us to live. At the end, the plan for the one bedroom cottage house was changed to a three roomed cottage.

Old half- built Concrete Structure

I went to the Estate yesterday with my sister, brother and cousin brother to start building the new house. Here in Sri Lanka, people are very superstitious when it comes to building houses. They believe the effect of planetary positions on you and your house. The magnetic and electric energy patterns in plant earth will be influenced by the other planetary positions. In order to absorb positive energies from universe, the shape of your house and its directions are important concerns. In order to draw positive energy from the universe, you need to draw the right design which is specific to one's birth chart and needs to have an entrance to the right direction. A house is started to build at a positive time (auspicious time) after performing religious activities. We didn't want to deviate from this common, well established practice. Yesterday, on 27th of April 2011 at 9.11am, we started building our house ceremoniously. Here are some photos of yesterday's ceremony.