Grass for my Feet: Hantana house renovated

I bought the house in Hantana, Kandy, back in 1984 and throughout all these years of living abroad, kept it going, sometimes by renting or by hiring a caretaker. Of course, in the early years, my parents lived there and took care of Roy, who attended Trinity College. After Roy joined us in the States, my parents returned to their home in Boralessa.

I thought of selling the Hantana house mainly because of the difficulty in managing it. But, every time, I remembered how much my parents loved the house and the hard times they had running it (we were students in the States and could not provide them with much support). My parents, especially my mother, had green fingers, and they transformed the barren hillside garden, filling it with mango, avocado, and other fruit trees. They also planted flowers. So, I decided to keep the house and spent quite a sum of money on renovations, replacing the dilapidated wooden windows with aluminium windows, replacing the front door, replacing ceilings, and painting the inner walls. The results can be seen in the photos below.

Renovating Hantana also meant that the furniture and appliances sent from my former house in Sai Kung and which had clogged Pondside for almost a year, could finally be sorted, some remaining at Pondside and the rest being moved to Hantana. I took this photo of the moving truck on its way to Hantana. We hired four men to load and unload the stuff. Sri Lanka had continuous rain and gloomy skies, but miraculously, the rain stopped and the sun came out in this day. And the rain returned, in force, from the next day.