Clarence Mikolichek has been putting together puzzles all his life.
For more than 35 years, the retired owner of CTM Construction built puzzles for a living — sort of.
“(Construction is) kinda like putting a puzzle together,” he said. “When you build a house, you take the different pieces and make them fit together.”
When winter came each year, the Silver Lake resident filled his downtime with jigsaw puzzles. When Mikolichek retired in 2014, he suddenly had even more free time. Within a year, he estimated he completed about 100 puzzles ranging from those with flat pictures to three-dimensional shapes. His grandest accomplishment in 2015 was a 32,256-piece puzzle depicting a New York City window vista that filled his living room after 800 hours of work. The undertaking made the newspaper.
Mikolichek swore that was it for giant puzzles. Maybe he’d tackle some others after a break.
“But not one as big,” he said.
Or so he thought.
This past week, Mikolichek had to do a bit of redecorating in his living room. He pushed a table across the room near the stove and turned it the other way to make room — for a puzzle. This one is 5 feet wide, 24 feet long and comprised of 42,000 pieces depicting international landmarks such as the Space Needle and Egyptian pyramids.
“After the last one, I wasn’t going to build another one,” Mikolichek said. “And then my boy bought this one for Father’s Day for me to keep me out of trouble, I think.”
The puzzle came in seven bags of 6,000 pieces. Each bag contained a section of the massive puzzle. Like the last giant puzzle, it came from Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store in Jordan.
“I started mid-October,” Mikolichek said. “I said I wouldn’t start until winter, but there were a few snowflakes on the ground in October.”
He set a piece of plywood on the living room table and built one of the sections on it. Then he stacked the next section on top with a layer of tackboard between each section as he went. When all the work was done, he was able to carry the sections together to the floor, unstack them and slide them together.
“The hardest part of building each section was probably the last 1,000 pieces,” Mikolichek said. “You’d have some trees or something, and they could be almost any place on the puzzle.”
He said that sometimes his wife seems glad to have him out of the way, but other times she wants her living room back. When the puzzle was completed, she was the one who reached out to the newspaper.
“People still say, ‘Oh, hey Puzzle Man’ after the last article,” Mikolichek said.
He estimates the landmark puzzle took him between 800 and 1,000 hours to complete, but he doesn’t plan to hold onto it forever.
“With the last one, I had 70 people come through the house,” Mikolichek said. “This time I haven’t told many people, but people might read about it and come by. There were a couple people I have to call that wanted to see it.”
Many of the puzzles he has finished have been sold at garage sales or given away. Some are picked up by family and friends. If someone wants this puzzle, they’re welcome to it, Mikolichek said. He plans to take it apart and give it away.
“There is no place you could put it up at 24 feet long,” he said. Someone told me to laminate it and put it up in the auditorium, but you’d have to glue it to a piece of plywood or something.”
He does keep and laminate some smaller puzzles, however, such as those that, once completed, are photos of his grandkids or family memories.
So is this it for Mikolichek and giant puzzles? He didn’t give a firm answer.
“I said that was it with the last one,” he said. “If I have puzzles, I build them.”
