Jigsaw puzzles are intriguing and sometimes a bit challenging games, training your ability of spatial thinking. As you progress finding fitting pieces, you slowly see an image assembling in front of you, giving you the motivation to finalize it without any pause. Even more sophisticated jigsaw puzzles – in terms of complexity regarding the puzzle pieces’ shapes – extend to the third dimension, forming a three-dimensional object, most often world buildings.

As I’m a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast, I always wanted to combine my two hobbies – puzzles and LEGO. After a while of tinkering with flat 2D jigsaw puzzles to get the right building techniques for the so-called tabs and blanks (the bulges and corresponding indentations), I decided to make the model even more sophisticated by expanding it into the third dimension.

This yielded the model of a residential house, consisting of eighteen detachable puzzle pieces. To keep the focus on their manner of building, I reduced the colors to nothing more than black and white, with each part being dyed in either color (except for the four roof pieces that are dual-dyed). One side of the building is left open to gain insight into the interior.

One jigsaw puzzle was fine, but what about having two? So, I decided to use the house as display case for yet another, this time two-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Sixty pieces are to be connected in the right way to form the picture of a vibrant landscape with a tree and a small waterfall, illuminated by the warming sun. By just taking off the two puzzle pieces forming the roof above the opening, the puzzle can be entered and removed, e.g., to create an entirely new picture. Another advantage of the simple coloring of the house’s walls is that the view on the nature scene isn’t distracted.

The building instructions are designed in such a way that you can strictly follow them to definitively get the correct puzzle pieces and the assembly thereof. But you could also build all pieces without connecting them immediately and assemble them afterwards, just as you would do with real jigsaw puzzles.

The house consists of 2477 pieces, distributed among the 18 puzzle pieces. Another 1372 pieces form the 60 puzzle pieces of the nature scene, so in total 3849 pieces are used. The model spans 34 x 36 x 26 studs and weighs 2.5 kg.