The day Linda and Jeff Groskreutz stumbled upon a 430-square-meter ranch house with long empty walls in Madison Lake, Minnesota, they knew it was the one.
“It was perfect,” said Linda, explaining she was excited to finally buy a house with walls expansive enough to display the rewards of her longtime hobby: show stopping, large-scale jigsaw puzzles.
Since the couple moved in last May, they have turned their new basement into a massive jigsaw gallery, with supersized motifs such as sailboats, fish, planets, elephants, giraffes and tropical birds.
Linda, 67, said that she and Jeff moved from another nearby town in south-central Minnesota because they wanted to be near the lake. But, she added, the big walls were a great bonus.
The largest puzzles are showcased in plywood frames handmade by Jeff, who is supportive of his wife’s time-consuming and wall-consuming habit, though he does not puzzle himself.
“Linda is really good at what she does,” said Jeff, 69.
He’s hung a total of about 115 000 pieces in eight of his separate, sprawling frames. One puzzle is so long it spills onto two adjacent walls.
Then there’s the one Jeff calls “The Granddaddy” – a 40 320-piece creation emblazoned with various Disney movie themes. It weighs 20kg and measures more than 6.7m across and 2m tall.
Each of the motifs from 10 Disney movies came in a different bag, and it took Linda 10 weeks to complete the whole thing.
“At the time, I didn’t have any wall space left, so it sat on cardboard in sections for several years,” she said. “Until I got a call one day from my minister.”
Her Lutheran pastor contacted her in 2021 and told her he was preparing a sermon series with a “fitting together” theme, and he wondered if she had a finished puzzle she could put on display at the church. Did she ever.
“I thought it would be a treat to see my Disney puzzle all together, so we took over each section of the puzzle in the truck and put it together across nine banquet tables,” Linda said. “It was there for everyone to look at for more than a week.”
Recently, her puzzles have had an even bigger audience since her husband shared a quick video walk-through of their basement on YouTube.
“This is a little tour of what I like to call our puzzle room,” Jeff begins in the video. “This first puzzle is 24 000 pieces. We didn’t have enough wall space to put it all on one wall so we had to wrap it around the inside corner.”
He comments that Linda was the first person in Minnesota to complete that puzzle – which she did in 2008 – with a touch of help from family and friends. She is featured on a hall-of-fame website for giant puzzle-solvers, where she is quoted as saying: “I look forward to the next ‘World’s Largest Puzzle’ that I’m sure will come out in the future. My only problem being, that I have no more walls large enough to hold any more of them, so I would have to move.”
The next puzzle in the collection that Jeff features with his camera is a 5 000-piece puzzle of the twin towers in New York City. Linda put that one together right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Next are two animal scenes, each with 18 000 pieces. He then shows four others on the walls.
Jeff ends his video with, “Well, thank you very much for coming on this little tour of mine.”
In her new house, Linda was thrilled that the Disney puzzle fit across the entire length of one wall, with just 5cm to spare. Some of her family members – she has two children and three grandchildren – helped lift and install the heavy puzzle.
“Finally, I have room for it,” she said. “This is where it’s going to stay.”
Linda completes a 1 000-piece puzzle in five to seven hours, she said, and she never needs a magnifying glass.
“I’ve probably put together a couple thousand puzzles, but only the big ones get framed now and put up,” she said.
She has stacks of boxed puzzles neatly piled on a pair of five-story industrial metal shelves, as well as stray jigsaw puzzles scattered on tables nearby.
After she puts in the work to finish an extra large puzzle, she can’t bear to take her masterpieces apart. So she covers them with thin insulation plastic, and Jeff builds the frames and hangs them – at least, the ones that fit on the walls.
“I don’t sleep well, so sometimes I’ll work [on a puzzle] until midnight, or I’ll occasionally get up at 2 or 3 and work on one,” Linda said.
She takes apart her favorite small puzzles and puts them back in their boxes so she can piece them together again months later. She said she is also a Sudoku puzzle fan, but adds she’d rather go fishing with her husband than tackle a crossword.
“I’ve always found doing puzzles relaxing, and I hope they help my brain,” said Linda, pointing out that puzzles help to improve short-term memory.
She has been puzzling since she was 10 years old, growing up in rural Minnesota.
After she retired from her accounting job in 2018, she said she decided to devote more time to the hobby.
“My parents would give me and my siblings a new 1 000-piece puzzle for Christmas every year, and we’d all work on it together,” Linda recalled. “But what really got me going was when a relative from Germany came to visit in the late 1990s and learned that I loved puzzles.”
As a thank-you gesture for helping him to line up motel rooms for a cross-country trip, the relative sent her a 9 000-piece Tower of Babel jigsaw made by Germany’s famous Ravensburger puzzle company.
“Then about four years later, he sent me an 18 000-piece, tropical jungle puzzle,” Linda said. “It took six months to put it together.”
To spread her love of puzzles, she recently started a puzzle library at a shopping center in nearby Mankato, where about 200 puzzles – many of them hers – are available for anyone to check out.
“It works like an honor system – you find the puzzle you want online, then you go pick it up, put it together and bring it back,” Linda said. “People have also contributed puzzles they don’t want anymore.”
She spends about 20 hours a week piecing together her creations. Her trick is to start with the edges, then fill in the pieces by color. She advises anyone tackling a large puzzle to use a room with good lighting and sort pieces into groups based on their shapes.
“If I didn’t donate a lot of my own puzzles, they’d quickly take over my house,” she said, guessing she has about 150 at home on her shelves.
When asked by a reporter about her latest jigsaw creation, she stifled a laugh through the phone.
“It’s a puzzle that shows a shelf with a bunch of spices,” Linda said. “I finished it while we were talking.” | The Washington Post
