Colorado man completes world’s largest commercial jigsaw puzzle after 4 years, 60,000 pieces and one sleepless night

I can’t even complete one of those 1,000 piece puzzles they sell at Walmart, so needless to say, this is MINDBLOWING!

After four years, more than 800 hours and one heart-stopping missing piece, a Colorado Springs grandfather has finished the world’s largest commercial jigsaw puzzle.

Lou Salas completed “What a Wonderful World,” a 60,000-piece map of the globe made by puzzle company Dowdle, last weekend — a project that arrived in 60 boxes of 1,000 pieces each, cost him $600 and ultimately stretched nearly 30 feet across his garage.

Salas, a retired puzzle enthusiast, assembled each of the 60 individual 1,000-piece quadrants one at a time in a dedicated puzzle room in his home, storing the completed sections on thick plastic sheets. His 8-year-old granddaughter — whom he called a “puzzle prodigy” — frequently helped.

But connecting all 60 sections into a single finished product became what Salas described as “the biggest puzzle within the puzzle.”

To solve the logistics, friends and family built an 8-foot-by-29.5-foot Styrofoam table in his garage. Salas then suspended himself from the ceiling on a rigging system — not unlike a construction crane — so he could hover over the center of the table and carefully place each quadrant without disturbing the others.

The project nearly fell apart when Salas realized that the 17th quadrant was one piece short.

“I didn’t sleep that night,” Salas told KRDO. “One piece ruins the whole thing.”

He refused to let the $600 investment and hundreds of hours of work go to waste. Dowdle, the Utah-based company behind the puzzle, agreed to ship him the missing piece, allowing the project to finally reach completion.

Salas has said he plans to donate the completed puzzle to another enthusiast or an organization rather than keep it.