Finally, a way to organize the jigsaw puzzles!

A couple weeks ago I got a good idea from a good book with a dorky name -- Confessions of an Organized Homemaker.



If I was a Really Good Blogger, I'd have photos, but I'm not and I don't, so justconcentrate extra hard and try to use your imagination.

The kids and I went down to the playroom and slowly tackled all the 20-some jigsaw puzzles that were precariously balancing on multiple stacks in half-broken boxes, many with pieces missing.

First, the kids would do a puzzle (which was fun right there, because it gave us a chance to do every puzzle we owned. Rachael said, many times, "This is fun!")

Second, I flipped the puzzle over and wrote a number on each piece. For example, the Hello Kitty had the number "5" written on all 100 pieces. The Curious George puzzle had a number "6" written on each piece. The girls helped with this, too.

Third, we put all the pieces in a ziplock bag and labeled it with the name and number, ie, "Hello Kitty - 5."

Fourth, we cut the picture of the finished puzzle off the box and stapled it to the ziploc bag. (The rest of the box went in the trash.)

Finally, we put all the ziploc bags of puzzle pieces into a plastic bin, labeled it "puzzles," and put it on the playroom shelf.

Hurray!

BTW, it took us about a week to do all this, usually working at about an hour at a time. We have about 25 puzzles labeled. About three puzzles were thrown away because there were pieces missing. About three other puzzles had a piece missing, but the girls begged me to keep it anyway.

I hated that so many pieces were missing. It made me feel awfully guilty that we weren't taking good care of our stuff.

But hopefully those days are mostly behind us ... with puzzles, anyway.