How COVID-19 Has Affected The Lumber Industry
Updated January 2nd, 2021
Updated February 1st, 2021
Updated April 6th, 2021
You’re sitting at home with you’re family watching a movie after dinner. Your eyes keep wandering down the hall to your bedroom door. It’s Friday, and you just wrapped up a 60-hour work week at the ER. Your belly is full, and you just want to sleep. You finally get the chance to sneak off to bed. You lay down, and as you do, your 14 year old Ikea bed frame creaks for the 1,000th time. It’s cracked in 3 places and only wood glue, screws, and your faith in Jesus are holding it together. As you drift off to sleep, you last though is “Tomorrow, we will build a new bed frame. I’ll teach the kids a thing or two about working with their hands. Honey will be so excited to have a quiet night’s rest.”
You find yourself at the building supply store the next morning, kids in tow. You’re ready to load up your old Grand Caravan with a couple of 2x4’s, 4x’4s, two 4x8 sheets of plywood, and a new drill if you get lucky with the right kind of deal. Here we go!
Hold up. You’re inside. There’s no wood!!! Wait….there’s a few sheets of 3/4” tucked behind those insulation rolls. “Who the heck put that back there?”, you think to yourself. Oh well. Grab two sheets. Next, 2x4’s. You find 12, but you need 14 . No bother, we’ll adjust the plans. 4x4’s? Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday. Ok. Annoying, but you can stop at the local lumber mill on the way home. Surely they have some laying around.
You go to check out. Your total is $283.27!! They’ll also require a year of indentured servitude and your 1st born child?! Bye-bye grocery budget for this week, hello new Gucci bed frame….Nope. Not gonna be able to swing this one buddy.
“Forget it, we’ll sleep in hammocks. Who can afford this? Why is wood all but gone? Why is it so stinkin’ expensive???”
“We hear stories like this everyday from our clients, and they just want to know WHY. They are so frustrated, it’s disheartening!”
There are multiple factors at play right now. When COVID hit the US, things started to fall apart, starting at the logging operations and working all the way down to the consumer. Both loggers and mills had to close up shop for safety/health precautions, or because the workers were getting sick and having to quarantine. This resulted in less logs, as well as less lumber actually being milled, i.e. a decreased supply of wood. Many mills shut down completely for several months.
Then, once 3/4 of the country was stuck at home staring at their empty yards and their blank, boring Sheetrock walls, they started thinking that they ought to improve their homes. Plus, they weren’t spending their money on vacations, going out to eat, or movie tickets, so they had more cash laying around than normal. This drove up demand significantly. It seemed like suddenly everyone wanted to build a deck to hang out on with their family during “Summer Quarantine 2020”.
A huge factor in the shortage of lumber as well is the insanely low interest rates currently being offered. People are building LIKE CRAZY because for the first time in their lives, they can afford the loans. Again, this has driven up demand and driven down the supply. The mills are fighting to play catch up now that they are up and running, and even those that have the lumber already milled are having a heck of a time finding drivers to bring the lumber to the retail stores.
Truckers are so busy delivering goods that used to be imported from overseas but are now being produced and shipped exclusively within the country that very few are available for anything as “unimportant” as transporting lumber. Many trucks were also stuck in at the mills out west for months during the winter due to record-breaking snow storms in the Rockies.
Because of the supply and demand challenges, the mills, and consequently the suppliers, are doubling, tripling and even quadrupling their prices just to keep up.
Our mills have been steadily increasing their prices since April 2020, and are now quoting their lumber at a 15 to 70% 20% to 120% 50% to 300% increase to us. Despite this, we’ve still only raised our pine products’ prices by a maximum of 5% 20% 35%. It’s been a struggle and a fight, but we’re working hard to help make your projects affordable by keeping the prices as low and consistent as possible.
Hang in there y’all. Hopefully this will end soon. Come see us, and we’ll get to the finish line together.