Hello! My name is Penny and I am a puzzle addict! No truer words have been spoken after this week when I finally started tackling my puzzle collection. I have been collecting puzzles since about 2009, but my puzzle buying addiction has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point where I’m sometimes buying the same puzzle twice, or in the case of one Aimee Stewart image I discovered, thrice! I can’t say much for my memory here, but apparently I REALLY LIKED this image. LOL
Let me count the ways (or places in this case) where I had my puzzles stored:
- Downstairs guest bedrrom closet
- Downstairs guest bedroom shelving unit
- Downstairs guest bedroom under the bed
- Living room entertainment center (these are mostly little kiddie puzzles I did years ago with my youngest son)
- Puzzle closet (in upstairs guest bedroom)
- My home office
My husband and I are preparing our house for the onslaught of a bunch of friends and family next week to celebrate my youngest son’s 13th birthday and his Bar Mitzvah. This seemed like the right time to finally consolidate the puzzle collection, get rid of ones I have either done or will likely never put together, and organize the collection once and for all. The first step was to get all the puzzles out of the downstairs guest bedroom and that in and of itself was a chore. Luckily I have two teenage boys who need to earn their allowance money so I had some relatively cheap labor. They took countless trips up the stairs with two huge duffel bags that I would stuff with puzzles and leave open at the top. Depending on the piece count and size of the puzzle box, I could usually stuff 12 – 14 square Buffalo size boxes in one bag and maybe 8-10 larger Ravensburger or other large box brands in the other. Then the boys would carry them up to the guest bedroom where the puzzle closet is located. I would follow them up, empty the bags onto the bed and then go back downstairs and re-fill. This happened over and over again until I had gotten rid of almost all the puzzles from the room with the exception of the small closet. I still have to clean that one out, but it doesn’t have that many puzzles in it — or at least I don’t think it does! Yikes!
Then for about another 3.5 days I painstakingly pulled out every puzzle already in the puzzle closet (and that was already a lot) and determined if I was going to keep it because I had not done it yet or re-home it because I’d already completed it or knew, even though I liked it well enough at the time I purchased, I was not not as enamored with it now, and knew I would never get it done.
Once this was done, and most of the entire bedroom was filled with puzzles from both locations I truly understood that I had a problem – a big problem. I still had way more puzzles than I could possibly fit in this one closet even though I’d had closet organizer shelving put in specifically to store a lot of puzzles. It was at this time I also realized how bad my puzzle addiction truly had become. Even after pulling out puzzles I’d already completed, a bunch from Goodwill that I no longer had a desire to do, and all my 2000 pieces and higher piece puzzles, I was still left with hundreds and hundreds of puzzles that I love and have yet to do. *SIGH*
And so began the last and most fun part of this organization project — I started playing puzzle tetris! I grouped all my White Mountain (WMP) puzzles together and the sheer number of those left me shocked — just under 100! I enlisted the help of Derek, my 16 year old, who is already significantly taller to stand on a step stool while I handed him the puzzles to put on top of the shelving unit all the way around the closet. We somehow managed to get all but 1 up there. I was feeling pretty good at this point, and he was feeling pretty sick of seeing WMP. My elation balloon was soon deflated when I discovered another couple of WMP buried on the bed and remembered I had one more box of 4 new ones in my office. 😒🤔
After this, I carefully grouped puzzles together by brand and box size to make my puzzle tetris game a little easier. Cole coon came in to help and together we had fun carefully stacking puzzles and then sometimes having to re-arrange things if I found a certain brand fit better in a particular area.
I have to say the final result looks absolutely amazing and I have pretty much used every last inch of space possible in this closet. Amazingly, I was able to fit everything in the room in there with the exception of most of my 2000+ piece counts which I ended up making room for in my own master bedroom closet along the very top. I still have more puzzles in my office that I need to organize, but it’s less than 40 so I’m not feeling too bad about those and I think they will stay for a while at least in the office. I need to start clearing some space in the puzzle closet by doing and then re-homing puzzles.
Want to see the results of my puzzle tetris game? I am pretty pleased with myself for finding ways to make the most of the space I have.
It was difficult to get a good pic of all the shelving and the floor under the bottom shelf which also contains puzzles, but I tried my best.
And here is the 200+ overflow area.
It feels really good having my collection much more organized, and I will easily be able to walk in and select a fun looking puzzle to start whittling down my puzzle count. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or …..