I met Marc Chartier through an ad I had posted on Kijiji. Spoiler alert. The ad was for a pile of wood we had accumulated from disassembling our now-grown children’s play fort, which had fallen into disrepair. We had built it out of wood scraps from a fence someone was taking down in our neighborhood many years ago. Disassembling the play fort was nostalgic but I fully understood that what was meaningful to me is not necessarily meaningful to anyone else, especially wood from a play fort where our children and their friends and cousins had spent many hours playing. No one would really care about the old wood that had sentimental value to me. So, instead of paying a junk collector to pick up the wood for a fee, I posted it as a free item on Kijiji. The free pile of wood got many views and Marc arranged to pick it up from our back lane. He came with a trailer attached and when I looked into the back seat of his car, I knew immediately the wood had found a fitting new home. In his car were many items he’d made of wood — miniature picnic tables, shelves, and picture frames. Marc collects wood scraps other people throw away and fashions beautiful things out of them. I asked him if I could write about his woodworking here, to which he agreed.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I met Marc Chartier through an ad I had posted on Kijiji. Spoiler alert. The ad was for a pile of wood we had accumulated from disassembling our now-grown children’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":600010200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_classifai_error":"","_classifai_text_to_speech_error":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"education-subject":[],"media-literacy-topic":[],"post_topic":[],"content_type":[24],"class_list":["post-600010199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":{"short_title":"","seo_title":"","deck":"","story_tag":"","byline":"Helen Lepp Friesen","updates":null},"apple_news_notices":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/uncategorized\/2023\/09\/20\/from-a-fence-to-a-play-fort-to-crates-and-crochet","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"From a fence to a play fort to crates and crochet","url":"http:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/uncategorized\/2023\/09\/20\/from-a-fence-to-a-play-fort-to-crates-and-crochet","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/uncategorized\/2023\/09\/20\/from-a-fence-to-a-play-fort-to-crates-and-crochet"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2023\/09\/1696786_web1_Friesen-market-0920.jpg?w=150&h=150&crop=1","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2023\/09\/1696786_web1_Friesen-market-0920.jpg"},"articleSection":"Uncategorized","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"laurieb"}],"creator":["laurieb"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Our Communities","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2023-09-20T07:00:09Z","datePublished":"2023-09-20T07:00:09Z","dateModified":"2023-09-20T07:00:09Z"},"rendered":"