Outdoor Carpet turned Football Field

Oh. my. goodness. Y'all, I AM SO EXCITED about this post! I have finally finished my big project for my room and it came out amazing...notice I didn't say perfect, but I've gotten over that (kinda!).

Just because I'm so excited, here's the finished photo:

OK, now for the details and  you will definitely have to bear-with or utterly-enjoy the math teacher in me. I measured every direction of the carpet I had, found a template I wanted to follow, and then started doing some dividing. Directions by photo to follow and then more detailed instruction at the bottom!

Step 1: Lay out the carpet and measure
Welcome to my living room :)

Step 2: Mark where you want the lines to be. I used a metallic sharpie so that I could see the lines a little more easily than the black marker showed up.

Step 3: Tape the sidelines so you keep the width consistent when taping the yard lines. I did this because I the painter's tape has a tendency to stray from a straight line and I wanted to keep it as straight as I could.

Step 4: Tape all the yard lines. Now, this is when it occurs to you that you have to paint where you put that tape, so keep stretching out that roll of tape (or a wider roll for better coverage) and make a tape line on both sides of the yard line tape.

Step 5: I did this step mostly for you guys, but I don't think you can even see it! On each piece of tape that was to end up being the yard line, I wrote 'Paint' in the middle so I/you would know which piece to remove when you start painting.

Step 6: Head outside! And try to remember to take a picture before you start painting, oh well! Now, at this point you will see I only have the skinny tape and in subsequent photos there's more tape. Well, the story there is that the spray paint wasn't staying well in the lines, even when I would use some styrofoam pieces as walls (you'll see this in a few more pics). 

Step 7: Add all that extra tape and keep painting! And recruit your dad to help!

Step 8: Bring that thing inside from the nasty Houston humidity and remove all the tape! You should have something looking like this! Now, you need to re-tape where you want to paint the sidelines. I lined up one piece of tape on the side edge of each yard line and then left a gap of about an inch and rolled out another piece of tape to section of the sideline. I didn't add extra tape for these, but I had some assistance in painting it this time (Thanks, dad!).

Step 9: Back outside! This where I painted the sidelines, and yes I forgot to take a pic before I painted :) This is the styrofoam I used as a wall for painting. It's the thing stuff designed to be used as insulation for your house. We have all kinds of random stuff laying around the garage, so use whatever you can find!

Step 10: Put that Silhouette Cameo that you love to use! I cut out numbers for my yard lines and taped around them to protect from the spread of spray paint! So I headed out there and did one last round of painting and then I could finally say done!

So, there you have it! A fabulous project that shouldn't have taken more than a weekend but took me a week and half trying to do it with any spare 20 minutes a night that I had! If you need more detailed instructions see below where I fully released the math geek! If you have any questions let me know in the comments section and I will do my best to answer ASAP!

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Football Field Carpet How-To

Carpet size: 6-foot by 8-foot

Diagram I used:

So, being as the endzones are twice the width of the space between goal lines, I counted there to be 14 sections of equal widths. Being as the carpet measures 6-ft by 8-ft, I divided the 8-ft in 14 sections, the math comes out with tons of decimal places, and the math teacher in me wants to tell you to measure out each section to 6.85714285714286 inches each. But, my ruler doesn’t use that common denominator, but if yours does more power to ya! (Insert smirky giggle here!) So, I rounded that off to 6 ¾ inches, because why not, right? Just kidding…I can’t pass up that mathematical opportunity…check it:
 6.85714285714286 would be 6 and a big nasty fraction, that yes, would go to the 100-trillionth place value…YIKES! But, I just said that the 6.8 was a good enough place to start; so 8/10 (.8) was close enough to ¾ (.75) for all the measuring that would be going on! See, now aren’t you glad you learned all those measurement conversions in school and how to approximate decimal places…hey, I teach math and even I am very grateful for my calculator J

So, now that we’ve decided to measure each section at 6 ¾ inches, lets roll that carpet out and start marking it. My plan was to use painter’s tape to mark the lines…but then I remembered I had to actually paint the line and the tape would be in the way. So, what I did was I marked each measurement with a sharpie on each side (for straight lines) and then even spaced 2 pieces of painters tape so I could actually paint the lines! Also, at this point make sure that you don’t paint an extra stripe in your endzones. Remember, each one is 2 of the sections we counted in our 14 earlier; in other words, there should be 12 sections that are 6 ¾ inches wide and then the endzones will be 13 ½ inches wide.