Mom and I got this smaller building put together, or perhaps it’s a separate wing of the larger building – we’re not sure. But it’s moving along much more quickly now! Unfortunately, we’re positive that the missing symmetrical piece you see here was not in the box; but hubby and I are brainstorming on possible ways to make new pieces for however many are missing.

We also completely filled in the top of the municipal building, and added the “el” (elevated train) to the right side of the puzzle. So much progress! My daughter even found a piece and added it in. 🙂

I can’t describe how exciting it is for us when we find a large connection, we’re having so much fun with this! None of the family is as delighted as we are about it, but we don’t care – we have each other, and our puzzle bliss isn’t dependent on anyone else understanding it. (Although most of my readers get it, don’t you?)

Check out the fantastic progress mom and I made yesterday! The last time we worked on it we got the top part of the building started (from the long windows up); when we began yesterday one of us said “it won’t be long until we can start adding all these window sections”. About 30 seconds later, one of us saw a connection and we were so excited!

You can see in the picture from my previous Mystery Box post all the window sections we had partially assembled on the right side. We had the majority of it in little bits and just had to find out how they all fit together. There were several pieces still to go, but once the big chunks were in it all went relatively quickly.

We had a great time! It’s starting to look like an actual image now, and it’s getting pretty exciting!

It’s hard for me to go into the puzzle room and not sit down to work on it. I try not to work on it when mom’s not here, since the purpose of the gift was for us to spend time together. I texted her last week and told her I “accidentally” worked on the puzzle. ☺ I took my husband in there to show him the progress we’d made that day and suddenly saw where one of the large chunks fit in – I couldn’t NOT put it in!

It’s been 40 days since we started, and we are no less delighted by it than we were on day one! 💝

It’s been a month since mom and I starting working on The Challenge of 2019, and we’ve made excellent progress!

About 2 weeks in we’d finished the sky portion of the image, and we’ve been working on the symmetrical pieces for the last couple of weeks. All these clusters are the results of that progress. You can see on the right side all the little assembled pieces of buildings, that’s what we’re currently working on. There are many buildings in this image, but I think there will be one enormous building in the foreground when we’re done – the Municipal Building in New York City.

The color line cutting makes things very challenging, and you have to try to make your brain focus on the shapes only, because color and background are almost no help at all. You can see the many straight edges on some of the pieces we’ve already put together; where the building meets the roof – straight edge, where the roof meets something in the background – straight edge. It makes it almost impossible to assemble the edges of the puzzle first, but we’re loving it anyway❣

Every piece we find and connect feels like an enormous victory, and mom and I are constantly stopping the other so they can witness the connection. It sounds stupid to put in into words, but it’s an extremely complicated puzzle and the connections almost never look like what you think they will – we’re so proud when we find something!

We’ve also gotten a very large chunk of pieces connected to sky, and believe me there were many little old lady high fives all around! Connecting two pieces together is awesome, but connecting a large block of pieces to the sky made us so unbelievably happy – we both have P.A.D.S., and finding these connections made our entire day. 😉

We still don’t have a final piece count, but mom promises to print out the pictures today so I can start counting the sky pieces and get a grand total. (Why we didn’t think to count them first I honestly don’t know, probably because we didn’t know that the whole box was only one image) I’m hopeful that whenever I post next about this puzzle I’ll be able to give an accurate piece count, we’re thinking it’s going to be around 1500 pieces. It looks like it may be missing a piece or two, but that doesn’t matter much to us, we’re still having a fantastic time puzzling together and enjoying this amazing vintage wooden puzzle. 😎