Today’s post is more of an opinion piece where I’d like to get your thoughts on a topic I struggle with most of the time. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back — this is a long one!

Have you ever quit on a puzzle before it’s finished?

Up until very recently, I really had not quit a puzzle midway through in an extremely long time. It is not something I like to do as I truly feel if I start the puzzle I should finish it before moving on to the next one. I was raised to not quit something in the middle, even if I didn’t like it or wasn’t good at it so maybe that’s part of the reason I struggle with it now as an adult when I can obviously make my own choices about everything I do.

Over the last few months I have officially quit three puzzles and I guess I’m feeling guilty about it for some reason. Should I? No, probably not, but nevertheless, I kinda do. So I thought I would see what others out there think. In reading through numerous FB puzzle group postings, I know I’m not alone in quitting on a puzzle I’m not having fun with — I read about others doing the same quite frequently.

The three puzzles that were sadly returned to the box were:

• Lunchboxes by White Mountain Puzzles
• Disney-Pixar Toy Store by Ravensburger
• Times Square by Big Ben

Lunchboxes is a fun image and I was really looking forward to putting it together. It’s been in my collection for many years and I believe may have been printed around 2014 or so (I’ll confirm on the box later). There are a ton of super cute, vintage lunchboxes from the 70s and 80s. I even had one or two, and remember seeing several others at school that my friends or fellow classmates had. When I first started the build, things were OK — after putting together the border I started with the school bus of kids in the middle, and the Wonder Woman lunchbox. It wasn’t until I started working the one above that, Flipper, and a couple of the others that I realized how blurry the image really was. I’m not sure why I didn’t see it at first, but once I was about 1/3rd of the way into the build I kept seeing more and more areas of the overall image that were extremely blurry and I was starting to really struggle with making out some of the pieces and where they might go. I kept at it for a while longer even though I was getting more and more annoyed. I had not run into this issue with the White Mountain Puzzles I’d done in the past. Usually they are quite sharp on image resolution and while the fit may not always be great, the crispness of the image always made up for any fit issues.

After continuing to struggle with the puzzle for a little longer and having a chat with one of my puzzle besties, Stacey, I realized it was okay to not finish this puzzle that I was truly not enjoying. It was at the point where I was not looking forward to any puzzling sessions, and it felt like I was just putting in a few pieces before deciding to go do something else away from the table. Not a good sign so I returned it to the box and set it aside for taking to a local puzzle swap.

Not long after that one, I started the Disney-Pixar Toy Store puzzle by Ravensburger. The image reproduction on this one was extremely sharp as are every Ravensburger puzzle I’ve ever done, and I absolutely adored this image when I first saw it on Stacey’s blog. But, when it came time for me to start my own copy I did something that I think ultimately caused me to lose all interest and quit on a second puzzle in about a one month timeframe. I did not sort the puzzle at all! I simply poured all the pieces out on to multiple trays, turned them face up, and started.

As you can see by the image, this is a minutely detailed image that does not have a lot of large areas of one particular image element. Most of the characters are 1 to 2 pieces big, and other than the Monsters Inc door, the largest Cars movie vehicles on the rug at the bottom, and The Incredibles family, there weren’t a ton of other larger areas I could easily latch onto and complete. This frustrated me to no end. Had I been smarter, I would have sorted it just a little bit in the beginning to try to separate anything that had the stairs in it, and anything that looked to be behind glass for the display case on the bottom right side of the image.

Now fast forward to this last weekend when I quit on what I hope to be my last puzzle for quite some time. A little background first. When I was re-organizing the puzzle closet, I enlisted help from my two teenage boys to move all my 2,000 piece puzzles to the top shelf of my master bedroom closet. When they were finished, they came into my office with a 2,000 piece Big Ben puzzle of Times Square and begged me to do it next. The image had a lot of billboards from musicals and other pop culture including three large NBA-related signs. One, a huge two-sign image of LeBron James and the other a slightly smaller image below it of the video game NBA 2K14.

I was not excited about the image in the least and really don’t know why I purchased it in the first place other than the extremely low price tag of $6.99 new. After swearing they would help with the puzzle if I did it, I reluctantly gave in and cleared the board. Almost immediately I realized this was a mistake. The pieces were super small and thin, had a fair amount of glare, and the knobs on the pieces were quite tiny.

As annoying as that was, even more annoying was the way the image on the puzzle was cut in comparison to the image on the box. Typically, I have seen puzzles where the image on the box is not quite as large as the full image on the actual pieces, and you end up with a bit more on the puzzle itself which is not represented on the box image. This was just the opposite. As you can see below there is a good inch of the left side of the puzzle where the bright green sign gets chopped off as does the skyscraper above it, and the Kinky Boots poster is almost completely cut off. WTH?

Cole started putting together LeBron but was struggling to find pieces for it as the image was a little on the blurry side. Though nothing compared to Lunchboxes, but still not very sharp. Derek hadn’t come in to help at all yet, and I was giving a half-assed effort on one of the skyscrapers,

After a few days of little to no progresss, I called Cole and Derek into the room and asked them to tell me honestly whether they had any real interest in continuing with the puzzle given what we’d already experienced. Luckily they both said no, and I couldn’t get the puzzle off the board fast enough! LOL

So there you have it – my long-winded tale of woe and attempt to rationalize my decisions to quit three puzzles. What would you have done in each of these situations? Would you have just powered through or would you too have thrown in the towel? I would love to know.