![a dark sharehouse full of queer friends cooling off after a hot day. A trans woman at the entrance says, "welcome!"](https://briarrolfe.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Screen-Shot-2022-04-21-at-6.15.25-pm-1024x834.png)
Like most millennials, I love staring at floor plans on real estate websites and imagining “”owning”” a “”home.”” I can finally excuse the psychic damage: it turns out this is a really useful trait for a cartoonist to have.
The sharehouse is a recurring setting that represents authenticity and safety for my characters, so I need to know where everything is and where everything goes. This also helped me get a feel for all the housemates, who at this point existed as dot points only.
![a floor plan for a messy sharehouse, based off several real estate photos of actual houses for sale. Some of the houses have been knocked down and turned into shitty gentrified apartments! Boo!](https://briarrolfe.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Sharehouse-scaled.jpg)
My notes called for:
Henry, Electra, Anira, Corey and Nassim live in the same sharehouse. Their ageing weatherboard house has a grungy, welcoming, down to earth vibe. The sharehouse is full of light and activity…sandwiched between a super fancy gentrified apartment block, where a house just like it was sold and knocked down, and a house owned by an old Italian couple with a bountiful garden.
![Henry's sharehouse exterior, with notes saying it's weatherboard, flaking, a bit wonky. Henry's room is very small and has second hand furniture.](https://briarrolfe.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/sharehouse-exterior.png)
The floorplan of the house shows that Henry is in the smallest room in what is technically a four bedroom house; he’s tucked away in the lowest rent room, a small once-storeroom at the back. The house overall hasn’t been redecorated or renovated at all since the 70s, and it’s full of mismatched second-hand furniture, fairy lights, milk crates as chairs, and pride flags. Almost all the furniture in this home was rescued out of hard rubbish on the side of the road.
![](https://briarrolfe.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/kitchen-interior-1024x666.png)
I really did love sharehousing, but wow… I think my biggest challenge as an artist is going to be representing a realistic mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.