I didn’t discover the meditative joy of jigsaw puzzles until my mid 20s on a family vacation to Hawaii. (It wasn’t my family, I had no business being there, yet I’ve gone along three times, each trip to a different island. How do I keep getting invited? I’m just that delightful!) The extended clan rented a house and there was always one or more puzzles laid out. Everyone would participate, but a core few of us became the obsessed dedicated players, methodically finding the edge pieces first and then organizing piles by colors. The largest one we attempted was a 1,000-piece puzzle of Route 66. Well, a grandpa in Colorado has just put us (and every puzzlete on the planet) to shame. Lou Salas just completed the world’s largest commercial jigsaw puzzle, “What a Wonderful World” made by Dowdle. Instead of 1,000 pieces total, this behemoth came in 60 1,000-piece filled boxes. Yowza! So how long did it take to finish a 60,000-piece puzzle? 800 hours over four years, with a little help from his family.

Lou Salas, from Colorado Springs, Colo., spent over 800 hours trying to fit the 60,000-piece puzzle together. “What a Wonderful World” by Dowdle comes in 60 boxes with 1,000 pieces each. Together, they form a full map of the world.

He told KRDO that completing the puzzle felt “bittersweet” after working on it for so long. He explained that it took him a couple of years to work out where he’d be able to put the puzzle together before he could even begin.

He decided to put each 1,000-piece puzzle together in his puzzle room, storing them all on thick plastic sheets, and his 8-year-old granddaughter, a “puzzle prodigy,” would often help out.

A missing piece threatened to thwart his project, however. He told the network that he “didn’t sleep,” after realizing the 17th quadrant was one piece short, but Dowdle agreed to send him the final piece, meaning that he could finally finish it.

Though Salas completed most of the project himself, putting all 60 sections together became “the biggest puzzle within the puzzle,” he said.

Friends and family built an eight-foot-by-29.5-foot Styrofoam table in his garage and Salas suspended himself from the ceiling so that he could put the whole thing into place.

Doing so took about nine hours, KRDO reported, and the puzzle took over the whole three-car garage.

The puzzle doesn’t come cheap, however. It used to be sold in Costco but is now only sold online, costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

However, Salas told the outlet that he’s happy to give it away for free so somebody else can enjoy it just as much as he did, as long as they also pay it forward when they’re done.

“You can’t put into words or a price on it or anything,” he said. “If somebody could do it, that’s good enough for me.”

[From People]

Every inch of this story warms my heart. Even the hilarious bit at the beginning where Lou says it took him years to figure out where to work on the puzzle, until he finally landed on… his puzzle room. I love it. Local Colorado station KRDO did a video segment with Lou where you actually get to see the monster puzzle. Not only is it ginormous, but all the continents look like they’re the same color. That’s hard! As any jigsaw player will know, prodigy and novice alike, the best strategy is to start grouping by like colors and features. To have soooo many sections of the final image be visually similar? I repeat: that’s hard!! And then the drama of the missing piece! I can’t help it, my conspiratorial mind immediately wondered if Dowdle did that on purpose, their own inside game figuring no one would actually be mad enough to complete a 60,000-piece puzzle. Even if that’s true (it probably is, I’m sure), good on them for sending Lou the missing piece.

Darn, this makes me want to work on a jigsaw again! It’s so satisfying — you get to make sense and order amidst a world gone mad, and all while sitting! Sadly, I don’t have space for my own puzzle room, so when I’m not crashing another family’s Hawaiian vacation, I stick to crosswords. But if you have the space, jigsaws really are a fantastic group bonding activity. I love that this is something Lou shared with all his people, but especially his granddaughter. What a wonderful memory she’ll have her whole life.