June 5, 2008

(posted by eve)

WE DID IT!!! The first quadrant is complete! Oh how frustrating the last couple of sessions have been. Our finish was bittersweet for several reasons. First off, some of the pieces were incorrectly placed, and we had a heck of a time finding them. We thought for sure we'd have to just wait until we were assembling the other puzzles to figure out. Thankfully, Jen has infinite patience and managed to get all the pieces we had in their correct spots. In celebration, she "hugged" the puzzle:



Our completed masterpiece:



Unfortunately you can now see that our puzzle is definitely missing 2 pieces. We've known this for quite some time and figured once we started working on the last part of the puzzle those pieces would turn up. They haven't. I'm convinced they're just in another puzzle bag, but Jen's a bit more skeptical. We are 100% certain that we didn't lose the pieces. We have NOT allowed a vacuum cleaner to be used in that room for 2 months now. (except for sucking up spiders). There is no way we lost those pieces. And we have no extra pieces left over. We're kind of at a loss as to what to do. We'll think of something creative!

TRANSPORTING:

Once the puzzle was completed we began the agonizing task of taking the puzzle into the basement. All of us (including Jen's husband, Tommy) had different ideas of how this should be accomplished. None of them were easy. The good news is, thanks to the Roll-O-Puzz that Jen bought to do the puzzle on she managed to roll the puzzle and at least get it down the stairs:



But even that had its draw-backs:



And after many attempts of trying to get the puzzle off of the mat, and much more damage later, we finally are now going to move the puzzle, piece by piece, onto the backing we have laid out on the floor. It's by far the safest, although it will take a few more hours to do that. Not only do we have to move every piece, we also have to reassemble quite a bit from trying to roll it up a second time and flip it over. This was a very hard lesson learned. When I left last night, this is where we were on moving from the puzzle mat to the backing mat:



It almost looks like the puzzle has been split!

So our total working hours on the first quadrant were 63.25 hours. We aren't counting the transporting into our working time as we're not attempting to make a picture out of the puzzle and figure out where the pieces go. We already know that. Hopefully soon we'll begin work on the second quadrant, which we are VERY anxious to do! We've learned several lessons the hard way with the first puzzle and hope to use that knowledge to our advantage.