Man set to complete 190-square-feet jigsaw discovers one of the 54,000 pieces is MISSING

A puzzle loving divorcee has been left reeling after working for months to complete an enormous 190-square-feet jigsaw, only to discover that the final piece was missing.

Peter Schubert was assembling the 54,000-piece jigsaw at his home in Hallerndorf in Bavaria, Germany as part of a Guinness World Record bid.

The 52-year-old said he spent four and a half months, training himself ‘like an athlete,’ in order to complete the mammoth Travel Around Art jigsaw, which features paintings from around the world including Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer.

‘I started by solving it by completing 10 individual 1,000-piece parts of the overall puzzle and, like an athlete, trained my stamina, my eye for detail, and I made a plan for how I wanted to proceed,’ Schubert said.

The plan was scuppered at the very last stage, however, when Schubert said he was shocked to find there was one piece missing.

He looked everywhere, even checking the vacuum cleaner in hopes of finding the missing piece, but to no avail.

Eventually, Schubert contacted Grafika, the jigsaw’s manufacturer, to request the missing piece.

The Travel Around Art jigsaw is available to buy for €449 (£399) and can be sent to puzzle enthusiasts in 26 countries. 

Though described as the ‘world’s largest jigsaw puzzle,’ the jigsaw is 497, 232 pieces short of a giant lotus flower design which holds the current Guinness World Record for most pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

It was assembled by 1,600 students in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2011.

Schubert has described himself as a true puzzle devotee and a very patient man – an attribute he said is essential in solving puzzles with thousands of pieces.

Described in Germany as ‘The Puzzle King,’ Schubert’s love of the giant games began 17 years ago when he came across an enormous jigsaw in a bookshop. 

‘I saw something that would go on to take my whole life in a completely new direction – A 20,000-piece jigsaw in a huge box!’ 

While he initially resisted the urge to buy the whopping 64sqft puzzle, he couldn’t stop thinking about it and returned to the shop the next morning.

‘Even today I can still hear the laughter of the saleswoman, who said ‘finally it is gone and now we have more space on the shelf again!,” he said.

The puzzle Schubert had bought was the largest on the market at the time and was a struggle to complete, taking him more than a year to do so.

‘It was the most difficult puzzle of my career,’ he said. ‘The frame alone had over 3,000 identical pieces in uniform beige.’

Since then, Schubert has solved around 60 puzzles including 3D, holographic and miniature puzzles. 

Schubert went through a divorce some 12 years ago and said that being single and not having marital responsibilities frees him up to organise his schedule around solving a puzzle.

Each time he sets out to complete a large jigsaw, he adjusts his everyday routine to allow everything else to revolve around the task.

‘I invest four to five hours a day before and after my shift on weekdays and I usually take a day during the weekend where I spend 14 hours on the puzzle,’ he said.

A professional fitter, who works in home decoration and construction, Schubert said his personal record for daily time spent on a puzzle is a whopping 15.5 hours in one day. 

Whenever he needs a break, he likes to take a short walk to take his mind off the puzzle, which he returns to as soon as his focus returns. 

He refuses to accept help from anyone, preferring his puzzles to be a solo effort.

Schubert believes that solving puzzles has had a lot of positive effects on his health and life, including allowing him to achieve a balanced state of mind as well as having a beautiful picture to show off each time he completes a jigsaw.

Despite having completed enormous puzzles, he said his greatest challenge was an 1,000-piece ‘all black’ puzzle he bought from Japan, which he found lacking in concept.

He said that puzzles bring order where there was chaos and can help to train people’s problem-solving skills. 

‘Imagine you have a problem and you cannot solve it quickly. It grows and grows, but only in your head, in real life it still remains the same.

‘But thinking about it blocks you from finding a solution. You are then immediately overwhelmed, you experience pure stress and many people turn to medication or alcohol.

‘You first get numb, but that pushes the problem backwards, it won’t solve it, on the contrary, a new one may be added.’

After finishing a puzzle, Schubert usually tries to display them somewhere for others to enjoy.

He is looking forward to showing off the 54,000-piece Travel Around Art jigsaw, along with some of his other puzzles, in a large gym once the missing piece arrives.

Schubert said his personal goal is to solve a total of 500,000 pieces across his puzzles. 

‘I am already at 430,000 pieces, which would result in a total area of 130 square metres,’ he said.

‘I am proud of it, considering I work full-time. Puzzles are a real time killer.’