A house drawn from memory keeps the rooms, not the lengths

A floor plan, drawn freehand in blue ballpoint across the back of the shirt. The walls are visibly out of square. Six rooms are labelled in capitals — KITCHEN, BACK ROOM, STAIRS, MUM AND DAD, MINE, BOX ROOM — and MINE is far bigger than the house it sits inside could actually allow.

No dimensions anywhere. That's not a mistake. It's the whole method.

Why are the walls drawn out of square instead of straight?

Because straightening them would replace what the drawing is actually recording.

Memory doesn't hold a tape measure's version of a house; it holds which room led into which, and roughly which way you turned to get there. A memory-drawn plan is honest about that — the walls lean and the corners aren't ninety degrees because nobody's memory is a ninety-degree corner either. Squaring it up would make it look more like a real building and less like what it actually is: an account of relationships, not angles.

Why is one room — MINE — drawn far bigger than the house could hold?

Because size, on this kind of plan, records how much of your attention a room got, not how many square metres it measured.

A child's own room fills more of their memory than the kitchen does, even if the kitchen was physically twice its size, so it comes out of memory twice its size too. That isn't the drawing failing to be a floor plan — it's the drawing being honest about which rooms actually mattered to whoever's remembering, which a surveyed plan has no way to show at all.

What is the crossed-out wall actually doing there?

It's the one place where you can see the plan being drawn, rather than just see the result.

Every other line on the page is confident — a room, a label, a doorway. The crossed-out wall is a correction caught mid-thought, left in rather than started over. It's the single mark that proves a hand made this, remembering as it went — a domestic version of the moment nobody thought to photograph, preserved by accident in the one medium that was actually running at the time.

Why is there no scale or dimensions anywhere on the plan?

Because adding them would claim an accuracy the drawing doesn't have and was never trying to have.

A number looks precise whether or not it's true, and memory doesn't actually know how many metres the back room was — it knows the back room was bigger than the kitchen and smaller than the garden. Leaving the numbers off keeps the plan honest about what kind of knowledge it's built from.

The doorframe does it the other way

Where a doorframe's pencil marks work precisely because a real measurement sits next to a year and a name, this plan works precisely because it refuses one. Both are accurate; they're just accurate about different things.

Who owns a floor plan of a house you grew up in?

Nobody but you owns a plan drawn from your own memory, in your own hand.

An estate agent's listing or an architect's drawing of the same building is a specific document somebody else made, and that stays theirs. A plan built from what you remember — where the walls felt like they were, what you called each room — isn't a copy of either; it's a new drawing, made of recollection rather than measurement, with nothing in it to license.

Does this work for the house you live in now, or only the one you grew up in?

Both, and they'd come out as different drawings for the same reason.

A house you've lived in for two years still has memory gaps, but not many, and a plan of it would come out close to accurate. A childhood home, left twenty years ago, comes out warped in exactly the ways described above — and neither version is the wrong one to draw. Several honest versions of a memory can be worth seeing before settling on which one to print, rather than committing to the first draft.

Does it print well?

Yes — a single-colour line drawing is exactly the register hand-drawn plans already live in.

Blue ballpoint on an oatmeal ground keeps it reading as a drawing rather than a graphic; the lines don't need to be perfectly even, and shouldn't be redrawn smooth. The labels need to stay legible at the size a shirt gets read from — plain capitals, not the scrawl memory tends to produce.

How do I get one made?

Describe the rooms at JustOG — where each one was, what it was called, and which wall you'd cross out. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Six rooms, no scale, and every one of them exactly where it was.