Simple Solution for a Puzzling Problem

My children LOVE puzzles! And consequently, we seem to have accumulated many. Some were Christmas gifts, others were received on birthdays...a large majority have been acquired at rock bottom garage sale prices. But regardless of HOW they were obtained, the bottom line is: they were ALL OBTAINED. And now must each be issued a space to reside in our home. 

I truly enjoy watching my kids arrange puzzles.  And I am amazed at their ability to reconstruct the images.  But beyond their developmental value, I enjoy puzzles and naturally find pleasure in observing their enjoyment also. 

My house is actually a bit of a puzzle itself. We have a small space to function in and a growing number of people who function in it...and so every little nook has either a purpose in its emptiness, or else its contents are methodically planned with intentional precision as to how to gain the most use of its area. And oftentimes items in my home must be placed in a specific order in order to appear orderly otherwise one thing or the other inevitably ends up utterly orderless and with no place to be placed. [Now read that 10x fast - haha...jk...don't hurt yourself. Ps - I may have *ahem* used a non-word...orderless, I liked it though…and I kind of feel like a Minnesotan saying it.]

So...this plethora of puzzles had me puzzled.  "Where can I possibly store all these?!", I wondered. 

I have several puzzle spaces.  Wooden baby puzzles are placed in a bin.  Large floor puzzles and puzzles with many small pieces are placed in a game cabinet.  And the stack of about 15 boxes of smaller 24-100 piece puzzles were shoved randomly in whatever space could be claimed for them on the educational shelves.  Those not lucky enough to be squished in somewhere were generally either dumped on the floor or piled on the counter.  This was not gonna fly.  Either the puzzle stash needed to be well thinned out - or I had to get more creative with my organization of them.  So, here is what I did...

I found a stash of plastic zip-closure bags. [I used up all my quart sized bags, so the image just shows sandwich bags...which may be big enough - you'll have to try it out and see.] I transferred all the puzzles into the bags. Then I filled an empty shoebox with the puzzle bags. I was able to fit 10 puzzles in the space that less than six puzzles would normally fit into. Not extremely drastic, but like I said, every inch of space counts around here.  

Before I tossed the boxes, I cut out the puzzle image from the top of each box and one of the smaller images from the side of each box.  The smaller images I taped to that puzzle's bag.  And the larger image I placed inside the bag. 

I also labeled all the puzzles with unique numbers. Sometimes the kids like to complete all the puzzles and line them up in the kitchen. That's great...until they disassemble all the puzzles at the same time. So, to alleviate some of the difficulty in regrouping mismatched pieces on occasions such as these, each puzzle was given it's own number. I wrote both the puzzle's # and the number of pieces in the puzzle on the cardboard back of the larger image I had cut from the original box. And then wrote the corresponding # on the back of each piece of that puzzle. Very easy. Takes just a little bit of time - but for the time and more so the frustration I know it will inevitably save me, I sure thought it was a worthwhile project. 

[uhhh...just realized this photo says 666...weird, and unintentional, just so ya know...]

So now, instead of random stacks like this everywhere...

I have one box...with a place...and a space, in my residential puzzle.  Ahhhh...nice.  [Sometimes it's just the little things, ya know?]