Construction

I have also heard that residential construction is booming and commercial construction is lagging.  The bad news there is the the construction segment that uses the same materials we use to build layouts, is the one booming creating a high demand.

For certain items here in Florida

I'm paying triple what it was 15 months ago.

Canada

In Canada in the maritimes and prices are double or triple.  A 2x4 is almost $10 and it used to be around $3.

Fortunately all my benchwork is basically done.

Mike

@mmount

I see the same rage about price here in Quebec, roughly the triple between the 1 january and until now

Friends in Europe tell me it's the same, price of wood is flying away for unknow reason

Price of Lumber

I haven't done any price comparisons lately but about 15 years ago when constructing my benchwork I used PVC boards instead of wood. It was about 30% more expensive than high-quality lumber but does not expand or contract with temperature changes.

PVC is also much "cleaner" than wood when it comes to sawing or drilling. By "cleaner" I'm referring to the sawdust/shavings.

I use wallboard screws which are extremely easy to work with -- goes into the pvc board easily. Even better, they are steel & can be reused if needed. No more slot stripping!

Not going to happen

Sorry, I can't see it as happening.

Once a price goes up, it usually stays there. Right now the companies are seeing a new demand and are "harvesting" additional profit from it to make up for the profits they didn't see last year. But in 6 months, the market (consumers) will have gotten used to the prices (grumble grumble) and the producers/marketers will see no reason to reduce profits.

It's like back in the day when Lotus 123 or dBase III were the rage. They sold tons of copies, (copy protected, too) and even once they made a large profit and paid off all the development and maintenance costs, found no reason to reduce their prices. Until Microsoft and Office came along, that is.

Now tell me why the Walthers grain dryer is priced at what it is today. No new tooling since being introduced 20 years ago. But the price keeps going up.

I watched the price of replacement slings for my patio furniture go up 8% in a matter of weeks. And the manufacturer also raised their shipping costs by the same. Can you imagine $167 shipping for a box containing 4 padded slings? But the other alternative after market company wasn't even interested enough to reply to an e-mail regarding them making them.

Think about how many prices (beyond gasoline) went down during the 2006-2009 recession. I didn't see any.

I'm not against profits, BTW. I fully understand tooling costs, operational and distribution costs. But taking advantage of a pent up market demand does irritate me. But I'll buy what I need for getting the project done. You get to a certain age, you figure that if you put it off for a year, you may have put it off for a lifetime.

Just finished building my house

Just finished building my house in December. My contractor told me how lucky I was that we'd locked in lumber rates back in February of last year; prices had gone up 75% from the beginning of construction.

Unfortunately, I'm going to be the one to finish my basement. This will mean that now I have to do it at the higher rates, unless they drop a bit.

Labor...

I'm in construction.  One of the other major drivers of price increases right now is labor.  Try to hire general construction labor. Good luck. The price for labor has gone way, way up, and there still isn't a supply.  Everybody I know is trying, without any success, to hire people. Including me.  The three staffing agencies I use when I get desperate have told me they just aren't getting people coming in right now.  

We are also entering a period of extended inflation, we have injected trillions of new dollars into the money supply, prices necessarily increase as each dollar is worth less. All of my suppliers have increased prices.  If you haven't felt it at the pump and grocery store yet, you will.  

If you want to postpone any lumber purchases until prices decline, you'll have to wait at least two years. After that, you may look back at the current prices as the good old days and wish you would've bought plywood when it was only $100 a sheet. 

Randy 

Interesting about the supply

Interesting about the supply side.  I haven't seen any less lumber at my local Lowes or Home Depot over the past year.  Sure, they may be paying more it there is supply.

Luckly for me I have bought 95% of the wood I needed for my layout before the prices shot up.  I was able to combine it with lumber I saved from the last one to cover most of the construction.  I only needed a small number of planks of 1x2 and 1x3 lumber to get things finished off.

We do plan to build a fence in the next month or two so that's probably going to cost more.  Yuk.

In relation

Here in Humboldt County there is a shortage of truck drivers and in the past six weeks they received a four to five dollar a hour wage increase. I know the log prices are steady and the mills are running on last years harvest and the year before, This could be one of the diving factors for them to recover the cost of doing business now.

I think a big problem getting bigger is in education.

I graduated from High School in 1964.  At the time I was told that if I didn't get a college education, I would never make a decent living!  My dad was a high school drop out running his own business that put the lie to that fable.  I became a refrigeration mechanic and worked steadily for over 40 years before retiring.  My wife who is an R.N. retired last December, about 10 years before I retired her wages passed mine, but nurses are in high demand especially in hospitals.  

What is our education system doing now?   They turn our some doctors and engineers, but I'm noticing when I go to the doctors office that many of them are from the middle east and far east.  A few are U.S. born.

As R Seiler said, skilled craftsman are not available at any wage.  Every kid in school wants to get a high paying job sitting behind a computer.  Nobody wants to get dirty doing work.  No body wants to get a skill.  When I was in high school there were shop classes where kids could learn skills.  Now most high schools have dropped shops, and the kids have to go to a Jr. College to learn what we used to learn in high school.  When my generation is gone, who will fix or build anything?

In Europe, when kids finish the 8th grade, they have the choice of going to a high school whose curriculum is geared toward college, or they can go to trade school and learn a trade.  I understand that right now a licensed plumber can demand and receive higher pay than most M.D.'s, but where are they?  Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, & mechanics are mostly older and reaching retirement age or already retired.  They can build cars with robots, but has anyone invented the robot that can trouble shoot and make repairs on anything?

At the kid's camp where I used to volunteer every summer until covid, there is a hardwood canoe hanging in the dining hall.  A high school shop teacher brought it up to the camp.  He is now retired.  He told me about the canoe.  He got in trouble with the student's parents because the kid spent so much time working on that canoe, that he did not graduate.  The teacher kept the canoe because he paid for all of the materials to build it.  That kid would be considered a high school drop out.  Today that kid lives in Colorado and does custom woodwork in multi million dollar mansions.  I'm sure he makes more than most college grads., and he is doing something he loves to do. 

The OP covers the supply side

The OP covers the supply side problem, but completely misses the demand side problem.

There was an expectation that homebuilding would fall off during the pandemic. That falloff lasted at most one or 2 months. Now there is a huge increase in homes being built and a massive shortage of housing. That's putting pressure on the lumber industry. So there is a supply side problem and a demand side problem.

Someone also mentioned that they aren't seeing a drop off in stock at their local building supply places. You are in a word, lucky. My local home depot and Lowes are regularly out of stock on the most basic dimensional lumber and plywood.

Also worth noting that Home Depot stocks overseas plywood called Sande and that price is also going up, because of the demand.

Last thing, someone said prices only ever go up. Tell that to the gas station when prices go up and down all the time. 

Market imbalances rarely lead to permanent price increases. 

About the supply...

There is a gentleman in Vermont who has a business building garages who recently posted a new video to his Youtube channel titled "TRAIN LOADS OF LUMBER JUST STACKED UP !!!! Why" .  The 9 minute video shows an enormous amount of lumber just sitting out in the middle of nowhere. 

Although he doesn't make any accusations there is something illegal going on, like say withholding product in order to create a shortage to justify increasing prices, it sure does raise questions.

Chuck

lumber demand side and labor supply

I read that builders were backing off plans for new construction because of the increased cost of lumber.

Maybe that's just the article writer poking around and finding a couple who were saying that but not really backing off yet. 

Other builders are putting "escalator" clauses into their contracts to pass the increases on to the home buyer because the prices are going up faster than they can predict. 

I have read that some labor is hard to find because of the stimulus payments and improved unemployment benefits, that people would rather sit at home and get government money than work. But I'm interested in whether Randy and other employer's experience bears that out, as it could be "narrative" rather than "news".

Another thing that occurs to me is that during covid there was a drop in illegal immigration, and I believe that has an impact on the supply of construction industry labor. But I suspect based on reports we'll have no shortage of casual labor by this summer.

I also disagree that prices only go up. If the cause of an increase is a supply/demand imbalance it tends to resolve and decay back to the prior price level over time. If the cause is inflation, however, prices go up but don't come back down because while inflation may be stopped, is it rarely reversed.

I'd like to ask this question if anyone knows: How difficult is it to put up a new sawmill? Can one be thrown together rather quickly or does it take a couple years of arguing with the EPA over permits? My perception is that in the golden days of railroading (no EPA) they built them and tore them down and moved them around a lot, so there might not be a lot to getting a rudimentary saw mill set up. But my friend brought up the issue of the EPA and the necessary "colonoscopies" as he put it. 

Shannon's Lumber Industry Update

This fellow has been fairly reputable.  A lot of good info in his podcasts. GS

Lumber vs PVC dimensional changes

I hate to disagree, but I'm afraid your expansion/contraction comment is not correct. I have done extensive research into wood vs PVC dimensional changes for the roadbed section of my Run like a Dream: Trackwork book and here is what I have found.

Wood is extremely susceptible to dimensional changes when humidity changes. The dramatic change is across the grain, which means boards can swell or shrink across their width or thickness, but have much less change along their length. Cork is a wood product, so it gets affected by humidity.

Plywood, with the different layers at 90-degrees cross grain to each other tends to constrain this change somewhat, making plywood more dimensionally stable with humidity as compared to cut lumber (2x4s 1x2s, etc).

Temperature changes do not affect dry wood much at all. If the wood is wet, the temperature change can cause the wood to swell as the water heats up.

You can help mitigate the effects of humidity on wood by letting it acclimate to the layout space for a few weeks and then sealing it well with a good primer sealer.

PVC, on the other hand, is most dramatically affected by changes in temperature and it's affected very little by changes in humidity. If you read the installation instructions for PVC molding, they talk a lot about being careful to manage temperature expansion/contraction. For example, they recommend with new construction you only install the molding after the heating has been installed and the interior of the structure has been heated to at least 50 degrees. They also recommend you make sure the interior is no hotter than 85 degrees.

They talk a lot about how to best fasten the PVC molding to constrain it and keep it from moving around due to temperature changes. In short, they recommend nails every few inches since that will help keep the PVC from moving around and causing problems later such as if the A/C happens to go out on a hot summer day.

In summary, wood is most dimensionally affected by humidity and PVC is most dimensionally affected by temperature. You can somewhat control the effects of humidity on wood by sealing it well with a good primer sealer paint. I'm afraid painting PVC will do nothing to change its coefficient of thermal expansion.

Coefficent of thermal expansion for PVC: 1/8" in length for an 8-foot piece of PVC molding and a temperature swing of 50 degrees (such as going from 70 degrees inside to below freezing inside because of a prolonged winter power failure -- we had a 7 day power failure in February and it got darn cold in the house).

A three inch wide board, however, can expand width-wise up to 1/4" with a 25% humidity change, but the change will be nil lengthwise. Most interior humidity in an air-conditioned house will swing maybe 5%. The humidity change can be a lot more if the house is not air-conditioned, with 25% definitely possible, as is that level of change possible in an air-conditioned house during a prolonged power failure.

Housing Bubble

I feel like the costs for houses have exploded, both for new builds and older homes. This feels a bit like the bubble back in 2006-2007, where the housing bubble was blossoming. If it pops, expect lumber prices to drop with the decreased demand for housing.

Based on all the posts on Facebook...

...of people in my local area trying to find housing, I don't expect that bubble to pop anytime soon. Several new developments in our area that have finally gotten permits and are building out quickly.

Plus there is a lot of rebuilding starting in the areas that were burned out last September in the wildfires about a dozen miles from me.

Bought a 1 1/4" x 3" ten foot long cedar trim board on Tuesday for $19.... for the house, not the railroad. House is being painted and some of the trim needs work.

Wood prices have gone crazy

$3.50 2X 4, now $9

2x12 from $25 to well over $50.  The Laggan Sub will have to wait. 

  "This feels a bit like the

I think the big difference this time is the unprecedented govt. spending due to covid. It seems like they must let inflation lessen their debt burden. The last time the govt had big debt was after WW2 and they paid it off with higher tax rates but the big money guys nowdays have the politicians in their pockets so they are not going to accept higher taxes( at least not on their tax brackets) ....DaveB

Housing

We are building or actually trying to build in Maui. Contractors have labor shortages and a backlog to build through. 
We have a price but because of material shortages we have no price guarantees but we have a price plus any possible surcharges. Basically a time plus materials and no we have not signed it. Crazy I might be but I am not stupid.
 

Back in Wisconsin the house was finished in July, 2020 and the contractor said if he didn’t have the wood in his warehouse the house would have been at least 20% more. Just think when the economy gets going again how much prices will really skyrocket.

Tom
 

The insanity of it all

Local here, the Lowes has a massive stack of precut 2x4 studs, last year's price was $2.37 a stick, Friday last week was a ridiculous $9.00 each.  A sheet of 3/8 sanded / primed one side ply was $49, sheet of 5mm "premium" underlayment $17.  The cost of the nails required to lay the "regular" underlayment flat would have offset the surcharge paid for the "premium".

Those "studs" were the typical quality I've come to expect; warped and wained to the point I call them "pine noodles".  They are barely worth the $2.40, no way in Hades I'd pay $9 a noodle for that trash.

Module builds will come to a halt when I run out of my stockpiled material.  I'm not paying brass prices for pull toys...

Wow. Looks like I dodged a bullet

...when I picked up all the 1x4 and 1x3 I would need for the benchwork of the majority of the other 6 modules 5 years ago while I was still working.  The fact that it's been sitting in my back porch while I'm still slowly building out the first two 8 foot modules stings a lot less when I realize that it would be 3 to 4 times more expensive now and on a fixed budget.

One of the things that's slowed me down is the realization that even a 2 foot by4 foot sandwich of homasote and plywood is too heavy to manipulate comfortably by myself, and I'm trying to re-imagine how to most efficiently slice two of them into roughly roadbed-wide strips and still create the trackplan I have in mind for the switching portion of the layout.

Maybe this summer when the weather is nicer, I'll pull out the table saw and re-saw those panels as part of the narrower yard that will be built about a year or more from now, and use the other stock I have to create the more curved trackage I want in my second module.

It might actually speed progress up once I get over the conceptual hurdle.

Janet N.

Other materials too

I manage heavy civil construction and we are seeing shortages with attendant price increases in multiple product's.

PVC pipe and conduit have shot way up, this has caused a 10-year high in wiring (insulation). Epoxy bases are short, driving shortages and price increases in fiberglass product's and industrial coatings.Steel such as reinforcing bar, beams, channels etc are way up, plenty of scrap feed stock at the mills, but energy and transportation costs are driving prices. The most recent is concrete, driven by shortages of cement and fly ash.

Vendors and suppliers are putting short time limits on quotes, some of the concrete suppliers here (DFW) will not schedule loads more than three days out. Engineers are struggling to help clients establish project budgets.

So, it's not just lumber for our pikes in flux here. Some are looking for a large commercial and housing burst in the fall / early winter. I pray not, but if so heavy civil projects usually fall off 8-12 months after a housing bust.

Time to build out those kits in the stash, a good distraction from the insanity, and super detail those areas we've been putting off...

Bill