First, sweet pinto in your signature! I really like that color combo. I did closely what you mentioned when I started installing today. I didn't totally remove the shifter and parking brake. I measured from the bottom of the sound deadening in the middle coming down from the firewall to the first cut for the shifter in the sound deadener (the piece that is the middle that covers around both the shifter and the parking brake). I then took the sound deadener and placed it over my carpet and at 23 inches made a much smaller holes to just get over both the shifter and the parking brake. It seemed to work pretty well. After that I just kept making small cuts to fit the carpet in starting with lining up the back. I trimmed some parts in the front to make it fit under the console, which I took out. I'll hopefully have some pictures up in the next few days. Good luck with yours! And don't feel bad, I've gone through many replacement parts restoring my Mustang - just part of the learning process it seems. Lol, seeing Eric's post, I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat.