Jessica Cheney can only guess how many jigsaw puzzles she has completed in her life. She estimates it’s somewhere in the “low thousands,” and at one point she was piecing together five per week.
“It’s good to think of puzzles like books,” said Cheney, who this summer moved to Denver , with husband and Louisville native Luke (who’s only completed a few hundred puzzles in his life, sadly). “Though perhaps they’re harder to put on a shelf and get satisfaction out of by just looking at the spine — unless you’re framing your work for permanent display.”
The Cheneys have been doing the opposite of that for the last seven years with their , helping build and install Little Free Puzzle Libraries while creating global maps and networks of them. They want jigsaw puzzles, of any size and complexity, to be shared, loved and shared again as fun, low-key activities for stress relief, and to bring families, friends and neighbors together for screen-free, in-person activities.
Now that she and Luke have a house with a yard in the Berkeley neighborhood in Denver, the final pieces are falling into place.
“We rented our place in California, so we could never build one in front of our house,” said Luke, who, like Jessica, is also obsessed with escape rooms and has visited well over 100 in California and Colorado. “We built some and had one in front of Jessica’s parents’ place (known as the Puzzle Palace, a vintage, upgraded Barbie Grand Hotel), but we’re excited to finally have our own place.”
The Cheneys on Sunday, Oct. 11, are showing off their latest, colorfully customized Little Free Puzzle Library to the public starting at 11 a.m. at 3926 Yates St. They’ll have a tiny ribbon-cutting (the tiniest in Denver, no doubt), puzzle-shaped snacks, and, of course, plenty of puzzles to share. Most important, the Cheneys said, it’s a chance for diverse neighbors to connect and, as is usually the case, leave friendly notes and suggestions for one another in the library journal.
There are about a dozen other puzzle libraries in the Denver and Colorado Springs areas, on their website, which unites their often-unrelated residential hosts. But this will be the first in their new neighborhood.
These libraries are much wider than the book versions, their contents taped together or rubber-banded so the pieces don’t get lost. If more than one or two of the pieces are missing, in fact, it’s just not a salvageable puzzle.
Puzzles were a saving grace that got the Cheneys through some stressful times, but they hated seeing them just collecting dust in the closet after finishing them.
“I think the puzzle libraries’ (contents) are usually kept up better than the books,” Luke said. “You’re more likely to see newer puzzles in better condition. … We call ourselves piece keepers.”
The Cheneys also helped an outside company design do-it-yourself puzzle-library kits that sell for $200 on their website — a feature that launched when they moved to Denver a couple of months ago. They’ve helped hundreds of people in general set up puzzle libraries around the world, and they’re just getting started in Colorado, they said.
“It really exploded during the pandemic, but the core goal is just to spread the joy of puzzling,” Jessica said. “People will leave notes or write messages and talk about the puzzle they just did. We’ve seen ones that say, ‘Your library saved me or brought my family together. I have a relative who has Alzheimer’s, and it was a way to spend time with them.’
“But also this weekend is a great way to meet some neighbors,” she added.
This story was updated to correct the grand opening date of Sunday, Oct. 11.
