If you want to prepare for Vastu consultation day properly, the good news is that the list is short. A floor plan, the direction of your main door, a few photographs and a clear sense of why you are calling will cover almost everything. None of it needs professional drawings or special tools.
This guide explains what to gather for an online or onsite Vastu assessment, why each item matters, and how to take the one measurement that people most often get wrong: the compass direction of the entrance. You do not need everything ready before you contact us, but having it to hand makes the assessment faster and the report more precise.
The 10-step checklist to prepare for Vastu consultation
Work through this list in any order. Tick off what you can; leave the rest for us to gather with you.
- A floor plan, official or hand-drawn, with rooms labelled
- The compass direction of the main entrance
- Photographs of each room and of the entrance from outside
- A note of how each room is actually used, and by whom
- The location of the kitchen stove, sink and any gas cylinder
- The location of toilets, bathrooms, sump, borewell and overhead tank
- Where heavy storage sits: cupboards, lofts, safes, store rooms
- The main reason for the consultation, in a sentence or two
- Any changes you are already planning: renovation, interiors, a move
- For a purchase: the builder plan and which parts are still flexible
Each item feeds a specific part of the Vastu analysis, as the sections below explain.
Why the floor plan matters most
The plan is how we find the centre of the property and draw the 16 zones around it. Without it, we cannot say which zone a room falls in with any confidence.
A builder or architect plan is ideal. If you do not have one, a hand-drawn sketch is usually enough. Draw the outer walls first, roughly to proportion, then add internal walls, doors and windows. Pace out the rooms if you need to; one step is roughly 75 centimetres for most adults. Mark the main door clearly, and add an arrow showing which way your compass said north was.
For apartments, include the balcony and utility areas. For independent houses and villas, include the plot boundary, the compound wall, the gate and any outdoor structures such as a sump or car shed.
How to take the entrance compass reading
This is the single most useful measurement you can give us, and it takes two minutes.
- Open the main door and stand on the threshold, facing outward, as if you are about to walk out
- Hold your phone flat at waist height, away from the metal door frame, grille or a nearby switchboard
- Open a compass app and wait for the reading to settle
- Note the number in degrees, not just the letter
- Step a metre outside and take a second reading to confirm
A smartphone compass is accurate enough for this. If the two readings differ by more than a few degrees, something metallic is pulling the needle; move further away and try again. Send us both numbers. We then correct for magnetic declination, the gap between magnetic and true north, which you can look up for any place on the NOAA magnetic declination calculator.
Photographs that actually help
Photographs fill the gaps a plan cannot show. For each room, stand in a doorway or corner and take one wide photograph that shows as much of the room as possible. Add close-ups of anything you are unsure about: a beam over the bed, the stove position, a puja shelf, a heavy cupboard.
Also photograph the main door from outside, the view from the entrance looking in, and the approach road or corridor. For a house, add the plot from the gate and each corner of the compound. Natural daylight works best. You do not need to tidy for the photographs; we would rather see the room as it really is.
Describe how the space is really used
Builders label rooms one way; families use them another. A “study” may be a store room. A “guest bedroom” may be where an elderly parent sleeps every night. Vastu recommendations depend on actual use, so tell us who sleeps where, where people work during the day, where the children study and which rooms are mostly empty.
For an office or shop, note where the owner or manager sits, where cash and accounts are handled, where staff work and where customers wait. See Vastu for office and Vastu for shops for what we look at most closely in each.
Water, fire and heavy points
Traditional guidance: the classical texts link the north-east with water and openness, the south-east with fire, the south-west with weight and stability, and the north-west with movement.
What we measure: where these elements actually sit in your building. So please mark the kitchen stove and sink, any gas cylinder, the inverter or electrical panel, toilets and bathrooms, the sump, borewell and overhead tank, and the heaviest furniture or storage. These points carry a lot of weight in the final Vastu report, and they are easy to miss on a plan.
Write down why you are calling
A clear reason gives the assessment a focus. It can be simple:
- We are deciding between two flats and want a view before paying the booking amount
- Sleep has been poor in one bedroom since we moved
- We are about to start interiors and want the layout checked first
- Business has been slow since we moved the office
- We want a general review of the home we have lived in for years
Whatever the reason, it shapes which zones we examine first and how the recommendations are ranked. You are also welcome to add specific questions you want answered in the report.
Extra items for a pre-purchase check
If you are buying, the builder plan is the main document. Note the flat number, floor and which way the tower faces. If the building is under construction, find out which elements are fixed, such as walls, plumbing shafts and the kitchen position, and which are still flexible.
For a plot, send the survey sketch with dimensions, the road positions and any slope you can see. A plot assessment pays most attention to shape, road direction, slope and corners. Our apartment buying checklist and plot buying checklist cover the details.
Extra items for business and industrial sites
For commercial and industrial properties, send a layout plan showing the entrance, departments, production areas and storage. Mark machinery, furnaces, boilers, transformers, raw material stores, finished goods and the dispatch gate.
Heat, heavy loads and material flow are central to industrial Vastu, so the more clearly they are marked, the more specific the advice can be.
Getting the home ready for an onsite visit
For an onsite visit in Bangalore, plan for about 2 to 4 hours for a typical home. Make sure we can enter every room, including store rooms, terraces and the utility area. Switch off nothing; we will ask if a particular appliance is affecting the compass.
It helps if the main decision-makers in the family or business are present for the final part of the visit, when we walk through the main observations. If you would like to compare formats first, see online vs onsite consultations.
What not to worry about
You do not need to rearrange furniture, buy anything, repaint or hide clutter before the consultation. Doing so actually makes the Vastu reading less useful, because we need to see how the space works day to day.
You also do not need every item on the checklist. Many consultations start with just a question and a rough sketch, and the rest is gathered during the process.
What happens after you send everything
Once we have your plan, photographs and readings, we align the plan to true north, mark the centre, draw the 16 zones and review each room. For online consultations, we follow up with a short call to clear any doubts. The written report arrives within 48 hours of the assessment, with recommendations ranked by priority. You can see the format on our sample Vastu report page, and fees are listed on the consultation fees page, starting at ₹5,000 for online. An online assessment uses traditional Vastu only, the 16-zone map and the 3×3 grid drawn on your plan; geopathic stress readings need a site visit.
Questions worth asking your Vastu consultant
Preparation is not only about documents. It also helps to note what you want to understand. Useful questions include:
- Which Vastu issues in this home matter most, and which are minor?
- Which corrections can we make ourselves this week?
- Does anything in the Vastu report need an architect or contractor?
- How should we handle the zones we cannot change, such as a fixed toilet position?
Asking these turns the Vastu report into a plan you can act on, rather than a document you read once. A good Vastu consultant will be happy to answer each one in plain language.
Next step
Once you have gathered what you can, you are ready. Read what a Vastu consultation involves if you want a fuller picture, look at the online consultation service for remote properties, or book a consultation and send the items above when we confirm.
