‘Diehard’ UNC Fan Transforms Back Porch Into School’s Basketball Court for ‘Surprisingly Affordable’ Price (Exclusive)

Sara Mathis’ house features multiple rooms and spaces with themed decor

NEED TO KNOW

• Sara Mathis transformed her porch into a UNC-themed space using stadium chairs she found on Facebook Marketplace
• Mathis is known for creating themed spaces in her home, including Harry Potter and Star Wars-inspired rooms for her kids
• Her DIY journey began after receiving a tool starter kit, which led to her successful home decor Instagram account

Sara Mathis grew up a “diehard” University of North Carolina fan.

Her two older sisters graduated from the university, her dad studied dentistry there, and, in 2009, Mathis herself graduated from the school. “As a kid, when I pictured college, it was UNC.”

During her years at the school, the university’s basketball team was on a good run. As a broadcast journalism major at the time, Mathis even had the chance to go to the national championship while working in sports broadcasting.

Mathis’s husband didn’t go to UNC for undergrad, but he did for grad school and, when the pair first met, he was actually a Duke fan (infamously the Tar Heels’ No. 1 rival). However, after Duke beat Wisconsin (her husband’s alma mater) in the 2015 national championship, Mathis jokes that she brought him over “to the light side.”

One day, Mathis, who is known online to her 125,000 followers for her DIY home decor content, says she was joking with her husband about the back porch and her plans for it.

“I was teasing him. I was like, ‘Well, if I could find stadium chairs, I can make it look like a basketball court,’ ” she says. “And it went from that to I had bought stadium chairs on Facebook Marketplace in literally 15 minutes.” The next day, Mathis says that the family rented a U-Haul to go pick up stadium chairs about an hour and a half away from their home.

“I just kind of got the idea, and I was like, ‘Well, this is way cooler than just a boring one with the comfortable outdoor sectional.’ And so I went all in, which is obviously what I tend to do,” she continues.

The content creator is no stranger to transforming her home into creative new spaces. “I love a theme,” says Mathis. Her home already features quite a few themed spaces, including her son’s Millennium Falcon-themed bed nook, her other son’s Harry Potter-themed room and even the custom pie shop playhouse that she built for her kids.

“I guess I’m just still a big kid at heart because I’m not afraid to be like, ‘Oh, I really love this. This is what I love.’ I have no ability to hold back. I just put it all into what I’m doing,” she says. “So I have the UNC porch. I also have a UNC bathroom floor upstairs that I did in penny tiles.”

Mathis says she “very much doesn’t want my house to look like everybody else’s.”

“I want it to look like it’s mine and to reflect what our family loves at the different stages,” she shares. “And I get a lot of questions from people about, ‘Well, what happens when they outgrow Harry Potter? They outgrow Star Wars?’ Well, then I have another project, and that’s really exciting to me too.”

She jokes that her next project will be her bedroom, which she teases her husband will be “Book Boyfriend”-themed.

Mathis says that building the UNC porch was “surprisingly affordable.”

The chairs they used came from an old high school auditorium, and she purchased nine of them for $200. “It was so serendipitous that the minute that I looked on Facebook Marketplace, they had just been posted five minutes before and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll take them.’”

Mathis had to paint the chairs the specific shade of “Carolina blue” in order to have them match the basketball arena’s chairs. She matched the hex code for “Carolina blue” and took it to a paint store where they mixed her a custom blend of the paint for the flooring. For the spray paint, Mathis found a blue can that was just similar enough to the school’s iconic color to cover her chairs. She created her own stencil to get the shape of the state and UNC’s logo drawn out perfectly in the middle of the porch, and even stitched her own pillows for each chair — made to look like basketball jerseys. Overall, the entire project cost about $800.

She originally got her start doing DIYs online after her husband gifted her a tool starter kit for Christmas in 2022.

“My husband is not a great gift giver,” Mathis prefaces, laughing. “One year we got to Dec. 23, and he had not gotten anything for me for Christmas. And so he just said he was going to run out and get something. For some reason he went to Home Depot. He got me a tool starter kit, which is not what I would’ve chosen for myself.”

However, Mathis says she had always been happy to paint a room or do an odd task on her own, and things like that, but she had “never really used a lot of tools.”

Mathis also calls herself a “people-pleaser to the extreme” and recalls being determined to show her husband that she liked his gift.

“I started using the tools, and it turns out that was the best gift ever because I actually really did love it,” she says. The first thing she built was a little cabinet. Then, Mathis jumped right into building a built-in breakfast nook in the kitchen, which she says was a way more involved project.

Soon, she started watching DIY content on Instagram and decided that she wanted to start her own account.

Her account eventually took off after another creator who was a lot bigger than her shared a link to Mathis’s most recent reel in her stories and made a comment about how sometimes the algorithm misses smaller creators.

“And so she shared it, and I was actually out in my garage working on a project, and I looked at my phone, and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ ” she recalls. “And all of a sudden I was getting more follows. So I felt like that kind of kickstarted it. And then I think it kind of snowballs.”

Mathis also shares how her sons love to get involved in her projects. “My youngest always really wants to help me sand. Anytime he sees me sanding, he wants to grab a mask and jump in and sand. My daughter, if she ever catches me spackling, she’s like, ‘Oh, I want to spackle.’ ”

“I grew up with a mom who was not afraid to paint. She would jump in and paint anything. And my dad was just really handy and could fix anything. And so I think that’s kind of what gave me the confidence to just jump in and try things, because I figured if I really mess it up, my dad can come help me fix it or whatever,” Mathis laughs.

She adds, “I hope that by the time my kids leave home that they have a lot of these skills and that they’re like, ‘Oh, I can build this for my kids’ or something that we can do together and things like that.”

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