FINALLY FINISHED. This was a thrift shop find, and probably one that I was most excited about. I’ve seen this lovely puzzle at Barnes and Noble a few times, and while I really like the image, it was hard to pull the trigger at fifteen bucks. I was over the moon when I pulled it off a thrift shop shelf, and even better, for around a dollar!

I was stoked to start it, and it had clearly been assembled once before. All the pieces were sorted into baggies. Like, really sorted. Buildings in one, roofs in another, mountain, water, foliage, edges…. The person who’d assembled it before was clearly a hard core puzzler! I dumped it all back in together, because that’s how I roll,  and got to work!

Right away I noticed it was dusty. Like, really dusty. Unusually so. Small tiny dust particles, as well as big fluffy bits. You can also see the edges of the pieces are ‘puffy’ and almost ragged, from what I can only assume was a dull cutting blade. Oooookay…. not the best first impression.

I got all the edge pieces out onto my board, but by then I’d had enough of this dust! I’d been blowing it out of the box, rubbing it off pieces, swiping it off my board; this stuff was everywhere! I finally said to heck with this- I’m solving this dust issue now. I took all the pieces, tossed them into a large plastic bowl with a lid and shook the dickens out of them for five minutes. Re-marks does use a nice, thick cardboard, so I was certain they’d stand up no problem to the abuse, and surely this would knock loose all the rest of this dust and I’ve have a cleaner set of pieces to work with. I dumped them into a strainer over the sink, one with big open holes to let all the dust fall through, and shook it there for another five minutes. “There-” I thought “Dust problem done!”

If only! After leaving a fairly large pile of dust in my sink, considering this was just a jigsaw puzzle we’re talking about, it was STILL unimaginably dusty! I’m not one to usually complain about dust, even when there’s a lot of it. It’s a cut paper product, so of course there’s going to be dust! But this was intense. Gratuitous. The most dust I’ve ever seen in a puzzle EVER. And keep in mind, this puzzle has been assembled once before! You’d think most of the dust would already have been knocked out, usually the experience I have with thrift store puzzles!

Despite the dust I persevered. The puzzle was still relatively fun, despite the weird puffy edges giving the pieces a really weird fit. They didn’t really want to nest in with each other because of it, making it difficult to tell if they were in the right spots at times. The buildings and roofs interspersed with foliage was a highlight here, an interesting challenge! Then I got to this point, nothing but blue mountain left, and it was like hitting a brick wall. This dust filled, ill fitting nightmare wasn’t fun anymore. Now it was just an annoying mess.

The finished result was still nice. The printing is crisp, and from what I’ve seen of their images, they pick really fantastic ones! But after this experience, I’d never buy one of these again, at the very least not for the new price. I’d have complained to Re-marks if it were a new purchase (something I don’t feel comfortable doing on a secondhand purchase), and this puzzle has definitely soured me to the company. I mean, this much dust is a quality control issue to me- something that should have been weeded out before being shipped off, it was that bad. I think I spent more time blowing, knocking, rubbing and sweeping dust off of and out of the pieces and off of my board than actually assembling them!

And after all that, this was all the dust left on my board after I took it apart. Seriously??

One last note… I wonder if this fellow knows he was immortalized in a puzzle in just his swim trunks? LOL!