Building Puzzle Palace

Collecting puzzles is a very space heavy, time consuming job.  You read that.  I wrote job.  There is a lot of work that goes into maintaining a collection as large as ours.  Maintaining is the wrong word to use.  I see myself as more of a curator of our collection.  

Each morning I log on to my computer and browse through my favorite websites in search of missing puzzles from our collection.  This usually takes me around 3 hours each morning.  I have about ten webpages I  look through each morning.  I'm always on the hunt for more pieces by Berrocal and Rick Irby.  My current obsession is to complete our Uncle's Puzzles collection.  I believe I am short by 12 more pieces.  From here I will move on to hunting down Toyo Glass puzzles.  This type of puzzle hunting is easy to do as there are a finite number of pieces produced and the collections can be finished relatively easily.  And of course, anyone who knows me will realize that I am still hunting down a few more Berrocal pieces. 

Whenever there is a specialized auction, I make sure to compare what is on offer to what we have in the collection.  There are a few pieces from days gone by that we are still looking for.  IPP puzzles are one. We are hoping to have a complete collection one of these days.  This will take us quite a while to complete as we are still missing well over 500 pieces.  

I also maintain the twisty puzzle collection by purchasing at least one copy of new mass produced puzzles as they come out.  I have made a conscious decision to not collect custom made twisty puzzles as there are just too many of them out there.  

The final thing that I've done to add to our collection is to order a number of custom puzzles.  I won't tell what they are because all are a surprise for George that I'd like to keep a surprise.  Of course George is always designing and building more puzzles so he is constantly adding to our collections.  He has always had a prototype shelf in his past homes, now he has two prototype walls.  Both are full of puzzles that he has worked on.  Where applicable, they are accompanied by the mass produced version of the puzzle.  

I know that storage is a problem for a collection that has over 10,000 pieces but not in Puzzle Palace. At least not right now.  We have 2301.15 linear feet of shelf space.  There are another 70' that have just been installed on the bridge.  Additionally, I have purchased 20 shelving units that have 4 sets of 36" x14" shelves each.  This adds another 240 linear feet.  That's a lot of storage ~1/2 mile of playable puzzles.  

When we bought this house, we wanted one that would hold our combined puzzle collections.  We found a house that has almost 10,000 square feet under air and expanded on it.  The first thing we had to do was to install shelves.  The house originally only had 204 linear feet of shelf space. We added over 2000 more feet.  This might seem like it would be enough, but each shelf we installed was purposefully made only 6 inches deep.  We did not want the classic problem of having puzzles hidden behind puzzles.  We know we have room yet for about 10 more years of IPP's but then we need to add more shelves.  

The easiest solution would be to build an addition to the house, but we are limited by zoning rules.  As it is, we are pushing the usable land space.  Our solution? Build out the attic spaces.  By doing this, we have added another 1400-1500 square feet.  George has one section of attic that he uses to store his puzzle building supplies in.  Another section holds all of our duplicate puzzles.  The largest attic is designated to hold George's printer farm that is on the way.  The final attic is used simply for normal household storage right now, but can be converted later on to hold more puzzles if we need it. 

George has always had a workshop for his puzzle building and we decided that this home would also have a workshop for him.  As it turned out, he has 3 workshops.  The Printer room where he has his 2D and paper printers, the Dormitory which will hold his 3D printers, and the main workshop which holds all of his 'dirty' machines.  Unlike his previous workshops, this one is attached to the house.  In fact, it is a section of the garage. When we bought the house, we had a three car garage.  Now we have a four car garage.  We extended the single garage to the fullest possible length allowed by zoning regulations.  George now has one very long workshop.  

People always ask me how long it takes to clean the house and dust all of the puzzles and shelves.  Everything in the house is open to the air.  There are no puzzles behind closed doors.  The entire house and workshops are all under air and this makes the cleanup very easy.  We have a wonderful HVAC system that includes UV lights which eliminate almost all dust.  The little bit of dust that does show up can be wiped away quickly with a feather duster.  We do a major clean once a week and that is all that is needed.  The other beauty of the system we have is that it has a built in de-humidifier.  The temperature is at a constant 77 degrees and the humidity level is set at 55 percent. Puzzle heaven. 

While Puzzle Palace is a private museum; it is open to visitors.  And of course, everything here is display and play.  Contact me if you are in the south Florida area and would like to visit.  You won't regret the time spent here if you love puzzles.