Serpentine belt replacement help

Hey everyone. I’m trying to replace the serpentine belt on my 2007 and I’m having a hell of a time getting it on there. I followed all of the instructions I’ve found online:

Loosened pulley, loosened tensioner to drop the pulley down, removed old belt, rerouted new belt...

But when I’m trying to position the last part of the belt back over the pulley, it won’t fit back over it. There’s about 3/4” of space that it just won’t stretch past. I compared the belt to my old one and they’re the same size so I can’t figure out why this won’t fit back on. Am I routing it incorrectly? The diagram I’m using doesn’t appear to be very complicated.

Any help is much appreciated as I’m growing very frustrated with this.

Edit: what circumference should this belt be? Both my old one and the one I just bought are 34 3/8”.

 

Well, after a lot of sweating and cursing I finally figured out what the problem was. The instructions I looked up said to adjust the idler pulley tensioner clockwise to knock it loose to remove the belt. In my particular situation all it did was slightly rotate the pulley for the belt to come loose.

I then noticed that there was a groove below the pulley mount, meant for lowering the entire mechanism. So I then had to rotate that bolt counter clockwise in order to lower the entire pulley and tensioner.

I do not know, maybe I misread/heard the instructions, but that was the solution for me.

Hopefully this can help anyone who faces a similar issue.

I do have one question left though. How do I know if I put too much/too little tension on the belt after resetting it?