A Puzzling Situation

Monday, January 23, 2023


 I like doing jigsaw puzzles, so several years ago Roland got me a puzzle table for Christmas. This year I received three puzzles—one from Caroline and Pete, and two from Roland.

Caroline and Pete had seen the Ghent Altarpiece while in Brussels on vacation this past summer, so they gave me a jigsaw puzzle of the interior panels. At 8 X 10 inches with 110 pieces, it was smaller than most of the ones I do but still challenging enough to keep my interest. It also fit on my puzzle table and left plenty of room to lay out pieces around it.

When Roland bought the puzzle table, he figured that would make for easy gifts in subsequent years, when he could buy me the puzzles to go on it. But this year he discovered that he still needs to pay attention to the puzzles he buys. In particular, he bought me two 1000 piece puzzles that are 24 X 30 inches. Unfortunately, the puzzle surface on the table is more like 22 X 31. Wide enough, but not deep enough.

We considered laying a board or some other rigid surface over the puzzle table, but we didn’t have anything that would work. Buying a piece of plywood from Home Depot or Lowes was an option, but we would rather work with what we already have.

The only other choice was to use the dining room table, but that wouldn’t leave us enough room to spread out comfortably during meals. Then I remembered the leaf. Adding it to the table gave us just enough room. Problem solved.

It just takes a little ingenuity to resolve a puzzling situation.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Tom added the leaf in to his dining room table for the same reason and since we always work 1000 pieces and from time to time your problem crops up he decided to leave the leaf in place year round.

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