The Grass Is Always Greener On the Other Side Of the Room

The family across the room in the beautiful, yellow house was not without an outdoors to celebrate the Fourth! TA-DA!!

Oh, to finally have a yard!! Woohoo!! There are a number of projects displayed here, so I'll share them in their own posts. Let's start with -- you guessed it! -- the green!!

If I'm being honest, this turned out to be a little more involved than I expected. The good thing is I had a solid sense of the steps before taking them on, so I just kind of started the process without thinking about what it would take. That helped keep the mental game positive!

So, in my stash of stuff, I have had a roll of green "grass" that I bought way back in the winter with a 70% off coupon at Michaels. What I assumed then was that it was too small for what I needed, but I was reasonably sure I could eventually get 2 and make it work. I unrolled it, though, and I didn't like that the piece looked bent in different places. These were creases that I really didn't think I could fix. And, I while unrolling it confirmed I'd need another, I realized I would have to very carefully plot and plan exactly where I would have to create walkways to cover the seams before I had a chance to step back and visualize the space as it "grew". I didn't really like either of these factors and immediately started Googling to find another option.

What I landed on was this roll of grass from Hobby Lobby:

50" x 100" oughta do it!

I certainly knew this was entirely more than I needed as the width of my yard is 64", but it took having to intentionally cover seams out of the equation. SOLD! The next smaller size was the same as the one I already had anyway. So, go big or go home.

The first hands-on step to this process was creating the template. There was nothing exacting about it. I just placed paper on the plywood, folded it up against angles and taped it all together on three sides of the house:

Then, after heading out and buying the only roll of the grass in stock (whew!) at my local Hobby Lobby, I unrolled and taped it down to the only non-carpeted space big enough in our house to receive it:

I didn't really think that part through before
buying it, either, but I was confident in
figuring it out!

From there, on went the template!

I cut around the template being sure to tape down where I just cut, or the grass would want to roll up under itself. Not only would that be annoying, but I really really really didn't want to screw up the cutting here!

After getting the main piece cut away (and working hard to get the roll back in the plastic casing with My Girl because that sucker did not just slide back in), I went back to trim to size:

Placing the piece on the plywood ended up being a two-person process. This happened mainly because of the rolling factor of the grass. Even though the "roll it backward" method works for, like, wrapping paper, I didn't want to over-roll it fearing creasing it in a way that it would look WHACK on the yard. We cannot have a WHACK yard. Rather, I utilized my people. My Girl helped with the initial run of it as she held one end while I taped going around:

She held it so it simply wouldn't fall and pull it off the table.

The next step of the process was untaping, gluing and reapplying the grass. I got out the Aleene's Tacky glue and just started from the left undoing the tape, smearing glue as best I could and weighting it down for a bit with a book and a hand weight on top or just with my hand pressing down. The back of the grass is a paper that doesn't allow the glue to seep up through the grass. But, it does wrinkle when it gets wet. This is where Aaron had a genius idea to use the Pampered Chef roller thingy:

I watched my mom wallpaper like crazy when I was a kid. I
was surprised I didn't think of using something like this!

This was a life saver as it got out ridiculous wrinkles with ease! I don't need the yard to be perfect, but wet paper wrinkles tend to pattern in unnatural ways. So, those had to go.

I untaped and glued section by section as it seemed fit. There was no measuring or real planning. Once I was convinced the glue was dry enough to keep pressure off of it for the grass to stay stuck, I moved on. This did put a few pauses in the process, but I realized that I couldn't keep taping or it would possibly lift the grass off its paper. And, it couldn't sit and dry completely if there were wrinkles to get out. So, hitting pause while slowly moving around the house was worth the time!

Might I throw in a "Holy crap, the piece of grass fit the table and around the house exactly!"?!

And, I'm thrilled with the outcome!

The yard, though, is far from finished! Keep going for the next step!