Y'all Been Checkin' Lumber Prices?

[Jstpssng]

Dang. I sort of naively assumed that lumber prices were coming back down to earth.

Wife wants a she-shack office built this summer. Something simple like 12x20 with a front porch, etc. Can just be 2x10 floor grid, 2x4 walls, 2x8 rafters or such. I didn't realize how much it would cost me! The t&g flooring alone... $62 a sheet right now? c'mon, man.....

They dropped this week...

 

[deezler]

Good. But still, tongue and groove OSB flooring sheets are $66 a PIECE right now?!? Jeeez, man.

I'm gonna start trolling craigslist/materials and FB marketplace for lumber. On a whim I checked craig's yesterday and found a guy selling 10 good sheets of lightly used T&G osb for $22 a sheet instead, DEAL. Gotta move quick, he had a ton of interest.

 

[check]

Geez, I have a bunch of T & G that I’m not using. Maybe I should sell it. Also a bunch of Roxull insulation.

 

[yanmars]

I have on order over $5,000 worth of that insulation but it is still several weeks out from delivery. Even if you had listed it earlier the trip to Ontario would not have worked. Hope the costs of materials slows soon. Higher interest rates could slow building .

 

[JasperFrank]

A neighbor has been building a small secondary house on their property for the past few months. Its been slow going due to the on and off rain situation this spring. The interior is typical 2 X 4, 16 on center, construction. But the rest of the house has me baffled. The exterior walls and trusses are framed with what looks like 6 x 6 timbers held together with bolts and metal straps. They started laying down the roof base yesterday, and they are using horizontal 2 x 6s for the entire roof. Never seen that done before.

 

[MossRoad]

A neighbor has been building a small secondary house on their property for the past few months. Its been slow going due to the on and off rain situation this spring. The interior is typical 2 X 4, 16 on center, construction. But the rest of the house has me baffled. The exterior walls and trusses are framed with what looks like 6 x 6 timbers held together with bolts and metal straps. They started laying down the roof base yesterday, and they are using horizontal 2 x 6s for the entire roof. Never seen that done before.

Our house roof is 1x6 on 16" centers, but it's 100 years old. Maybe 2x6 on 24 is less expensive than plywood or OSB right now, or, the only thing available? Who knows.

 

[MossRoad]

That reminded me of my father's house. The entire house was roofed with X by 6 tongue and groove Douglas fir on 4' centers. I put X because I do not know the thickness. He bought a full train car load of Doug fir and California redwood and had it shipped here to a lumber yard siding. He had an arrangement with the lumber yard owner to sell him the portion of the car that he didn't use at below cost. He saved a bundle. Anyhow, he put the fir through a router and made his own tongue and groove. It was then covered in 3 layers of felt and tar paper, then tar and pea gravel.

From the inside was beautiful. There was a massive ridge beam that he laminated himself (maybe 18" tall by 6 or 8" thick). It ran the entire length of all three legs of the Y shaped house off of a center post. There were 6" wide rafters running up from the walls every 4', to the top of the beam. The beam was about 3' higher than the walls, so it was a low cathedral ceiling. He invented some gusset system and interior/exterior overhangs that he used where the walls met the ceiling. So there was a 2' overhang outside the house and a 2' overhand inside the house, which created a space for indirect lighting to illuminate the ceilings. They made opaque panels to set in the interior overhang bays and man, was it pretty.

Anyhow. Boards for roofing has been around a long time, before plywood was invented. Same thing with flooring.

 

[jyoutz]

Timber stumpage prices have dropped, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to lower finished lumber at the retail market. There’s a fair amount of processing, transportation, and middlemen between the woods and the lumberyard.

 

[MossRoad]

I should note that flat overhangs do not do well in freeze/thaw climates where there is ZERO insulation in the roof, such as my father's. In later years, he designed some foam wedges to take up the flat overhang, and put at least 2" of styrofoam insulation on the top of the roof, covered by OSB and then shingles. He said when he built the house, natural gas was almost free. In the late 70's, not so much. Anyhow, he was an architect and the house was a place to test out materials and techniques. He enjoyed experimentation. A new homeowner might not see that as a plus if they paid for something experimental and unproven.

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

Timber stumpage prices have dropped, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to lower finished lumber at the retail market. There’s a fair amount of processing, transportation, and middlemen between the woods and the lumberyard.

And fuel cost have gone up while the spot lumber (90 day futures) price change up or down.

 

[dfkrug]

Anyhow, he was an architect and the house was a place to test out materials and techniques. He enjoyed experimentation. A new homeowner might not see that as a plus if they paid for something experimental and unproven.

At the other extreme are the actual builders, who strongly resist new materials or methods. You can hardly blame them, as they want to fixed-bid a job and that can only be done with a very well-known procedure.

Like the designer/architect, the new homeowner may also want something better, using new materials and techniques.

You can imagine the resistance to plywood by tradesmen back when it was introduced in the 40s and 50s.

 

[JasperFrank]

I asked the neighbors today about the roof. Cause all I could see was a fortune being spent using 2 x 6. They had worked out a deal with a mill that was only 4 miles away, and it worked out to be less expensive than plywood, but much, much stronger. Also a bit heavier, and thus the timber framing. So, I guess it makes sense. We also have a glut of available trees to mill because of the recent local wild fires. I know its an old way of doing things, pre-plywood. I had just never seen it done before on any other construction site I'd been to. Its fun to see people adapting to the current building supply economy, and to see that, in this particular situation, it was more cost effective, to source local, and to revert back to an older style of building a house.

 

[rbstern]

Update: Lumber futures have crashed hard in the last 30 days. From $970 per 1000 b.f, to $667 as of market close yesterday.

Will take a while for that to show up in retail products, but we should see some price relief soon.

 

[LS Tractor Owner]

^^^^^ I sure hope so..... I have been delaying projects due to the price of lumber!

 

[Root Cause]

I have 'heard' from an unverified source that home materials will return to pre-pandemic prices before the end of the year. So this is giving me hope that it will come down to something more reasonable.

 

[Jstpssng]

I have 'heard' from an unverified source that home materials will return to pre-pandemic prices before the end of the year. So this is giving me hope that it will come down to something more reasonable.

Watch what you wish for. With diesel approaching 7$/gallon and still rising, if that happens it will mean that we are in a hard recession.

Fuel prices notwithstanding, I hope that prices never get back to what they were pre pandemic. For the first time in decades, sawmill owners have been able to invest real money in equipment and infrastructure; rather than gumping old junk together again trying to keep things going.

 

[Root Cause]

Watch what you wish for. With diesel approaching 7$/gallon and still rising, if that happens it will mean that we are in a hard recession.

Fuel prices notwithstanding, I hope that prices never get back to what they were pre pandemic. For the first time in decades, sawmill owners have been able to invest real money in equipment and infrastructure; rather than gumping old junk together again trying to keep things going.

I did not say I hoped or expected it would return to previous prices. It was what I heard. I would be happily surprised if it gets within 50% of what 2x4s and OSB boards cost in 2020.

One would have to live under a rock not to know that gas affects everything we do or buy. As this was a thread specifically about lumber, that is what I was relating to.

If a mill has been waiting for decades to replace worn-out equipment then that is an issue the owner needed to address decades ago. The consumer, obviously, pays whatever the price is at the store. If new equipment is a part of this increase then I hope they invested wisely and that they see increased profits and share some of the savings with the consumer to get it down to a reasonable level. I am willing to pay for goods and services at a reasonable rate but OSB going from $7 to $54 didn't happen just because of diesel fuel or capital investments. It took several, within the supply chain, to bake inflation and greed to make that happen.

As for a hard recession, that may need to be a discussion in another thread but I don't see anything that this point that will keep it from happening.

 

[rbstern]

As for a hard recession, that may need to be a discussion in another thread but I don't see anything that this point that will keep it from happening.

 

[plastikosmd]

^
exactly why I’m so concerned
I’ve witnessed the track record

 

[WVH1977]

Bought some premium pine for shelving in my house today at Lowes. It was expensive. I looked at the tag on the lumber and it said prodcuct of New Zealand. Maybe I am just naive and don't understand the lumber business but why can we not get our own wood from here in the states. We have plenty of loblolly pine right here in Virginia. Hundreds of thousands of acres across of good yellow pine just in this state. Why would Lowes have a company on the other side of the world ship pine lumber to America?

I am just trying to understand this???