How to Complete a 5000 piece Ravensburger Puzzle: one Puzzle Moms approach

From 500 pieces to 5000 pieces!

As my puzzling journey continues, I find that I want to start challenging myself with higher piece count puzzles.

The last few years, I’ve branched out into speed puzzling. This has caused my speed to increase while I casually puzzled and I found I could finish 2-3 smaller puzzles in one night. It was now obvious to me, if I wanted to savor a puzzle (enjoy it for weeks at a time), I would need to increase my piece count.

Before this year, my largest completed puzzle was 3000 pieces. A dark Noah’s ark image that was gifted to me in high school. And I am no stranger to 1500 and 2000 piece puzzles. But even still, I wanted more.

I found this Artistic Mickey Ravensburger puzzle on Amazon. Knowing that it was colorful, full of characters I love and recognize, I knew this puzzle was my next step.

(As an Amazon Associate, do know that if you click an affiliate link on this page and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. See my disclosure policy here.) Get your own 5000 piece Artistic Mickey puzzle here

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Three things I looked for before buying a 5000 piece puzzle:

The size of the puzzle needs to fit the size of my table.

The image needs to be recognizable, clear, and bright.

The puzzle pieces need to be of good quality and feel nice in my fingertips.

Check. Check. and Check.

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First Steps: Sorting 5000 pieces

The sort took 4 hours and 45 minutes over 2-3 sessions. It was a very sortable puzzle. I sorted each piece right side up into it’s appropriate pile. The distinguishable piles included frames, Mickey’s canvas, the edges, and all the various colors. See full sort timelapse here.

You may notice I completed a few items in the sorting trays: a few edges, Mickey’s canvas, the Cheshire cat. Sometimes you just need to put a few pieces together while you sort. 😉

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Where to Start? Finding what calls to me.

To begin, I didn’t start directly on my table. I wanted to leave the table free of extra puzzle pieces. So I used three black foam poster boards, along with my sorting trays, to lay out the pieces.

Pile after pile of princesses (what called to me) made this an exciting start. I used a pancake spatula to transfer the piles from the sorting trays to the black foam posterboard. This helped prevent the pieces from flipping back over.

I continued this pattern until all three of my poster boards were full.

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Moving to the Table

Very carefully I slid these sections off the posterboard and onto my table estimating where they would go.

Then, I completed the border! (And realized this puzzle is huge!)

Once I got into the bigger colors and the frames, I moved around a lot. I wouldn’t let myself be stuck on one section for too long.

Little by little, this puzzle started filling in.

And in.

As I went, I used sorting trays and the black foam posterboards to move the pieces around the large puzzle.

The Dalmatians at the end took the longest as I needed to sort them. I arranged them by collar color, then piece shape.

It’s surreal to see it completed in person. It’s so large and really does feel like an accomplishment. It’s fun to go back and look at all the cute little sections.

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Documenting the Duration

Overall, the puzzle took 46 hours to complete. That’s over a time period of about three weeks.

I documented my time by keeping track of activity in 10 minute increments. This allowed me to get up and move around my household whenever I was needed. I recorded the time on post-it notes and circled every six “10’s” as I went.

You may think that I kept track of my time to race the clock, but speed puzzling a 5000 piece puzzle would have been exhausting. Instead, my family and I played an estimation game to see who could guess closest to the actual time of casual puzzling completion.

I was very happy my son Mason was incorrect in his guess.

And side note, I love to watch TV, YouTube, and movies while I puzzle, but that significantly slows down my time, so I opted to not watch any videos during this whole completion. I did however listen to music and podcasts.

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Here are the following things I used to complete the 5000 piece puzzle:

• A very large table
• Sorting trays (Found on Amazon)
• Black foam poster board (found at Dollar Store)
• Pancake spatula
• Post-it notes
• Writing utensil
• Smart watch or timer, to keep track of time.
• a good light source
• a selected puzzle [that I loved] (Found on Amazon)

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Final Thoughts

Mad props to Ravensburger for producing a wonderful puzzle with a great image and great piece quality.

This puzzle is already being passed around to the other Puzzle Moms and I know I will get it back undamaged and ready to be completed again.

The next question I ask myself is: where to go from here? 6,000? 9,000?

Happy Puzzling!

~Heather