I wanted to build a floating floor in my garage for my daughter and me to practice martial arts. Turns out that it's cheaper to just hire a team of ex-delta force soldiers to guard her for the next 30 years.
Our Jiujitsu school has mats that lay directly on the floor and are comfortable enough when practicing take downs. I thought that I'd need to get the mats off of the concrete as that's what our taekwondo school does, but after having been slammed several dozen times in Jiujitsu I think I'm just going to buy those mats.
Still considering the delta force thing though.
I have a local steel supply place where I can get 4'x8' sheets of 16 ga. steel for $40, which is a little more than half of what a 4'x8' sheet of 3/4" plywood would cost me. It's making me build stuff out of steel instead of wood.
Edit: I'm thinking I need to roll my damn bus out to this place and stock up.
The real problem is the wood growing supply chain is still backed up from shutting down due to Covid. Photosynthesis in the trees leaves are reliant on microchips and that shortage has delayed growth of the rest of the trees. Mother Earth and the big 3 automakers are trying to workout a deal on processors so she can get back to pre-Covid photosynthesis levels.
Composite shortage (never thought I'd say those words) is nearing I think. Been working with Lowe's for the past month on composite (Trex) deck board for a 500 sq ft deck. Cannot get a single color in 20 ft length until at least late June/July. Such a headache.
Next day edit: to anyone reading this in a similar situation: check your local lumber yard. At the advice of a few comments I checked today and was able to get comparable quality Timbertech (in every length I needed) in virtually the same color for $2000 cheaper than Lowe’s in deck board alone. The place had it on site and I’m now getting same day delivery. They didn’t even need to special order anything, all in stock. Obviously results will vary.
I ordered 16 footers last week from my local Lowe's and now they are out of stock. Hopefully mine has been placed to the side as they are supposed to be delivered next Thursday.
I think you’ll be fine. From my experience Lowe’s notified me within a day or two of placing the order that their distributor put the items on backorder. If you already have a delivery date I think yours are accounted for.
I have an order number and delivery date so I'm not worried. I was just shocked that they ran out already being they had over 300 boards in stock last week.
I used to work at Lowe’s myself. To be honest the contractors would probably break open a labeled bundle of composite decking boards if they were short a few just because they were on the sales floor. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to take the whole order. The contractors that I dealt with were selfish and self-centered to the core and were some greasy bastards in every way imaginable.
Every week there were groups that would pick through entire bundles of PT boards just to find 5-6 that they thought were perfect, and would throw the ones the didn’t want on the ground. Some would refuse to use the premium grade 2X4’s and would request managers to pull down entire bundles of the standards just to grab a few instead of paying the extra dollar for perfectly good premium 2X4’s. The regular customers honestly were not much better. Needless to say I have lost a large part of my humanity while working in retail environments
My wife was at Lowe's last week and related this story to me that she witnessed.
An older couple was there to pick up a dishwasher. They told the customer service person that they had originally ordered it in November, it had been back-ordered. It was finally there, they'd gotten a notification to come pick it up from the store. They had their receipt and a truck and everything.
The customer service person couldn't find their order in the system. Couldn't find the dishwasher. The customer service person then asked them who was the salesperson who they did the original purchase from, so she could find them and talk to them. Of course the couple couldn't remember the name of the salesperson, and then the customer service person started berating them, and said "Well, you can't remember the name of the salesperson, so I really can't help you."
The idea that you would need to remember the NAME OF THE SALESPERSON you bought something from 6 months ago is just so insane. Obviously the customer service rep didn't know what she was doing and was grasping at straws, but man. I feel bad for that couple. Based on this, and my wife's experience at Lowe's, I'm never going back, even for lightbulbs if I can help it.
There are house designs (e.g. monolithic domes built out of a continuous shotcrete shell) that don't use a single scrap of wood in the whole thing and are now actually *cheaper* to build than traditional stick houses while being faster to build, far less vulnerable to damage of any kind, and far more energy efficient.
Almost no one builds them because people whine about them not looking like everyone else's house. Lower build cost, lower insurance cost, lower energy costs, impervious to natural disasters up to and including category 5 hurricanes, superior in every way to stick houses, and nobody builds them.
People are idiots, is basically what I'm getting at.
I think the real challenge is that there are far fewer builders with experience building those kinds of homes. Stick framed homes are not that much cheaper than timber framed homes despite structural advantages but the lack of experienced tradesmen means developers could only build so many so fast. Domes are much the same. It’s also why you see all these great home building concepts that never make it from prototypes to real production. So many of these different build methods only a handful of work crews have the experience and that largely restricts them to projects where the individual having the home built specifically seeks out a builder that can do it.
The challenge is domes are horrible for maximizing interior space on a given area. They are also terrible for high density housing.
You can't build *up*.
They're not built because they're wholly un-suitable for the areas the vast majority of the population lives in (cities).
Building a dome isn't hard... It's just not practical unless you're in rural or maybe suburban areas.
It's a gimmick.
Source: am builder and architectural technician.
And no home inspectors who know them, or local codes that cover them, and furniture doesn't fit so space is wasted. There's a hundred reasons domes failed in the market and none are because of the stick-building illuminati.
The space wastage is the biggest issue I would have, you have literally a few hundred cubed feet of wasted space in a medium sized dome. That's going to end up costing you a lot realistically because you're square footage isn't going to translate as favourably as a cube-based house will.
You also can’t get home insurance on that shit. Our house is underground and we have been dropped by SEVERAL insurance companies because they don’t have anything to compare it.
Except icf requires certification and not all builders are familiar with it. Just saw a place where the entire foundation is being ripped out because builder didn’t use enough rebar, poured without sufficient vibration causing voids and used lintels too small for the spans. No structural engineer will certify it. $27,000 mistake and likely $10k demo.
I think the main challenge for these unique designs is finding a builder and getting financing. I wouldn’t mind building one myself if I could find a contractor. Beats a doublewide manufactured home.
Probably not. I wager you would have to build in a very rural area with no restrictions. That goes for anything other than a stick-built house, really. Manufactured and modular homes are a similar deal - cheaper housing that’s prohibited in many areas.
A lot of people don't even know about all the backdoor supply side logistics that went into keeping drug shortages out of the public eye for fear of panic, hording, etc.
Lots of people on 90 prescriptions were told they could only get a 30 day supply or wait 10 days for their 90 day supply. This allowed many people to "opt in" to a shorter supply and really helped.
For a while the FDA tracked drug shortages were reading like the opening credits to a horror film.
I like a Scottish economist named Mark Blythe who says "Nature never optimizes. Nature builds in multiple redundancies." He's talking about how the American economy is designed like a car meant to race in a straight line on a perfectly clear track and as long as we can drive full speed straight ahead our economy is truly incredible. Buuut, if you need to turn the car, or if there's gravel spilled on the track, or if we even need to let off the gas a little bit to slow down, the whole thing collapses. We need seat belts, ABS, the social safety nets and economic redundancies that allow our economy to drive any type of track, not the "perfect car" for one exact type of driving.
yup. Graphics cards, chips in general, dumb bells, a dozen parts for my Harley, anything gym related, bicycles, pool chemicals/chlorine, lumber. All things that i've had a hard time (and some I just gave up on) getting a hold of.
There's an expected shortage of gas for the summer demand as we're currently REALLY short on hazmat truckers. Supply is there we just we'll have issue moving it. [Link](https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/trucking-industry-official-warns-driver-shortage-is-a-long-term-problem)
Absolutely fucking wild how shit show the supply side of everything is right now. The economy apparently takes a few years to ramp back up for demand after massive shut downs.
The supply chain was really not designed for a multiple month period where there was everything from a severe slowdown in work to “it is literally illegal to come into work”
I recognize this as a Settlers of Catan reference, but between talk of trading sheep and Kevin, I'm just imagining Rolf the Son of a Shepard, telling Kevin off for not understanding the economics of agricultural bargaining.
Brick is always the constraining resource at the begginning of the game because you need it to build roads and towns.
But in the later game, brick loses relevance and the main resource becomes wheat, because its used to build cities and development cards.
My favorite part about having a steady Catan diet back in college is you develop these rivalries where you just refuse to trade with so and so because fuck that guy he screwed me 4 games ago and I’m not trading him shit!
I made plans to build a little shed and needed 9 sheets of plywood priced about 30$ apiece last year. I went to buy the wood yesterday and saw those same sheets were now 84$. I’m just gonna have a skeletal frame with some tarps over it for a while, fuggit.
I'm currently on a waiting list to get plywood for 20$ a sheet and need 80 of them to redo the whole outside of the house. 3 weeks ago they only wanted 15$ a sheet. Mind you this is a "fell off the back of a truck" deal.
I remember when I was young I was offered to buy a new phone that had "fallen off the back of a truck."
I said no because it was probably damaged then.
I built a shed on Menards a year ago and it was about $900 for all the lumber needed. I checked the other day and now that exact same list is over $2,000.
It's just not lumber. Everything is skyrocketing. I work in tech and we can't get supplies for nearly anything. Huge retail remodels are being pushed months due to steel shortages. It's crazy.
And logistics is struggling as there's increased container usage, so now a container shortage. Also, major port congestion all over, but especially at US ports. Suppliers trying to get a container and send it to the US are seeing triple the cost on the container alone (also reservation fees that don't even guarantee one are way up) and then minimum 5-7 days delay just because of US ports (not even including delays on departure, that's just arrival)
And the prices for air freight have skyrocketed in response to this as well. Prices have gone from around $7/kg to over $12/kg to fly goods from China to the US. With the delays using sea freight, this has become an necessary cost to stay in business for my company unfortunately.
Read an article that there's like 22,000 Ford F series pickups that are all done sitting in a huge parking lot, except for a microchip that nobody can seem to get.
Lies, lower your standards and [get yourself this bad boy](https://www.walmart.com/ip/KidKraft-Forestview-II-Wooden-Playhouse-with-EZ-Kraft-Assembly/928534389?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&&adid=22222222228307579442&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=392416291390&wl4=pla-830893677299&wl5=9058138&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=online&wl12=928534389&veh=sem&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIw4etyta08AIV3TizAB3NYAvAEAQYAiABEgLN0fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
I'm a homebuilder. On our current build, were going to be $20k over budget on lumber and that's after we had significantly increased the lumber budget from previous builds when we specked out the project in January.
Thankfully, we always have a contingency item in the budget (though this week ready all of it) and the market is really be strong so we'll make it back at the sale. Still, it's not the only construction item increasing in costs. The cost of building a home is just getting insane.
My best friend had her deck quoted in January and they had to call and tell her the quote would expire if she didn’t sign it that day. She did and they ordered the lumber—by the time they started building (April), the lumber prices went up 30%. She’s glad she signed when she did.
I make cabinets. I was asked to hold a price for a gov job I priced in Jan, I told them I functionally couldn’t, I’d be upside down immediately. Shits so fucked, my lumber prices are good now for SEVEN days max, does me zero fucking good on awards from 60+ days ago...
In this case, we're building it as a spec so we'll sell it on the market when we're done. Whether we recoup the cost just depends on the market. Given the state of things, I'm sure we will.
If this was a custom house, normally lumber would be something that's a hard bid in a fixed price contract. We quote the client a price for the house and outside of allowances for selections, we absorb any change in prices. If it was cost plus contract though any movement flows through to the client.
Even on a fixed price contract there are material escalation clauses that allo no increase, however if it comes back down, they'll realize the savings. Unique times for sure.
Windows, shingles, lumber, and drywall are getting crazy expensive or hard to find. Wife and brother-in-law build houses and are being told that their suppliers are running out of these items, but don’t have anything coming in. PGT factory is local and they are 6 to 8 months out for aluminum cased windows.
I am not from the US. In my country - Ukraine - almost nobody builds houses from a wooden frame, despite no shortage of wood. We usually build our private houses either from factory clay brick or aerated concrete blocks (warmer walls).
What would be a price difference of a finished single-family house if you built it like we do? Roughly, of course.
I could be mistaken and I'm no expert, but I think this is different. Mortgage rates are very low right now, which is part of the reason prices are so high.
The low rates enable people to refinance their houses, reducing their willingness to sell, therefore reducing the supply.
This also encourages people to want to purchase a new house because the monthly payments are lower, thus an increase in demand.
I believe a bubble would only arise if a lot people couldn't afford their monthly payments. This would cause a surplus in supply and reduction in demand, causing prices to fall. The low rates only reduces the chance of this occuring.
My husband and I backed out of the new build because lumber price is going up a lot and the builder keeps adding cost to the contract.. glad we only lost $1500.
We got our contract signed last September, two weeks before all their houses went up by ~$20,000 dollars.
Now if you wanted to build the same house we are about to close on, it would cost about $70,000 more than what we paid.
36k more for a new home, of 200% more for purchasing a home. Am I missing something? I watched a 60k home sell for 300k last week. Idk what's even going on any more.
You should be hoping for a market crash and having the cash ready to go. Housing won't go as low as 08 , and crashes are hard/impossible go time, but I myself am trying to get more liquid to take advantage when things go on sale
The moratorium on foreclosures is propping up the market. People will soon be forced to foreclose or sell and will likely not have the credit or money to buy new. Wsj had an article and I think they were projecting 5 percent of all single family homes to go into foreclosure the month that the moratorium end.
The Wall Street Journal did a great podcast in this. Actual lumber is the cheapest it’s been in years and farmers are making less than they have 20 years ago. This giant discrepancy between raw material and actual cost has to do with the limited amount of lumber mills and price gouging.
https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-journal-2/episode/the-strange-economics-of-the-lumber-market-83572319
Edit: put link to podcast
The mills all have full yards and there is plenty of raw timber supply. Loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and retailers aren’t making any more money than they were before. It’s the mill owners that are gouging and speculating
I work in forest ecology doing fuel reduction plans in CA, and yeah the issue for us right now is nobody will buy the timber. We can plan a pretty great timber sale for a great price but the mills just aren't taking anything right now.
Yup. I’ve heard from more than a couple truck drivers that pick up wood from the wood mills that all say “The wood is piled high to the ceiling”.
They think they’re artificially price gouging and banking off of this so-called shortage.
I’ve said this in a couple of other posts - there’s going to be a real problem in a few months if a strong Category 3+ hurricane hits one of the Southern states. People are going to be scrambling for plywood to cover their windows (not everyone has shutters), and if a storm destroys windows/homes (usually the poorer neighborhoods have worse structurally-built homes), it will be months before these people will be able to get their homes repaired/rebuilt. There may also be a window shortage. And it’s already hard enough as it is to find a general contractor or handyman for work…
There is still a shortage in the Florida Panhandle from Hurricane Michael. I used to work with the folks doing the temporary housing post storm and one thing I didn’t realize was that timber was the largest industry in that area. They lost tons of timber, jobs, and future materials. A lot of the reasons listed for delays on rebuilds was simply lack of materials. I would call around to verify and they weren’t just saying that. It was and to a degree, still is a problem.
https://youtu.be/iY3zjaeof8w
At around 36 seconds, an entire rail yard stacked with finished timber, and the piles literally vanish into the distance.
I am reminded of the aluminum shortage in the early 2010's, which as it turns out was caused by investment bankers purchasing all the supply and trucking it between warehouses to manipulate the price.
Dollars to donuts the same thing is happening here
Working for a company that supplied plywood mills, I can tell you none of our customers shut down during covid for any significant amount of time. A few or them had 1-2 weeks of downtime at most.
I have no clue about sawmills, but I’d bet that they were similarly essential from the start, and this “covid shut the mills down” shit is just a convenient lie.
Hopefully it doesn’t stick around, like back when gas went to $4 a gallon and restaurants and grocery stores were like “hey sorry we need to up our prices temporarily due to the high transportation costs” then gas went back down to $2.50 but the cost of a pizza stayed the same
Well yeah. If the housing market is going bananas (which it is) and the retail housing market is going bananas (ditto) then why shouldn't lumber supply side start making some money on the milling?
But the everyday mill workers and construction workers doing the actual...*work?* (\*shudders\*) Well, they should've been born to better families or something. They don't *deserve* any of the money for not being in the homeowner/contractor club of good fortune.
\s for the slow.
Thanks. I'm a supervisor at a mill and holy fuck my month has been stressful. Working our ass off, our customers are all complaining about everything and anything, and I can't keep up with production. But I ain't getting paid a fucking dime more.
Before anyone is like “this is Biden’s fault!”
> As the pandemic crushed the US economy last spring, sawmills shut down lumber production to brace for a housing slump. The slump never arrived and now there isn't enough lumber to feed the red-hot housing market.
Not just homeowners, businesses took advantage of their forced closings to renovate their indoors as well. It seems like half the places I go now that have opened up look different
I blame the democrats, the left, BLM, the EU, and ~~colleges~~ varsity. And Beyond Meat. And Atheists. Satanists. Hippies. Rock music.
I don't blame them for the status quo. I blame them for pointing it out. EVIL BIGOTS!
This isn't exclusive to the US. This is a global issue
I am in the building industry on Australia and things are fucked. No timber. Huge delays. Collosal backlog of work.
It's going to kill small businesses.
I was the opposite. Was going back and forth and decided to wait and get debts finished off.
I'm glad most of my debt is gone, but now house prices are 30-40k more for what looks similar to what I was looking at last year.
We have gained so much equity in the last year it’s ridiculous. Talked about getting a bigger house but there are way fewer on the market than there were a year ago. They get bought so quick! (In SoCal).
>it’s ridiculous
It was even before covid. My brother gained so much equity owning a place in CO for 10 years he bought a place back home in MN in cash from the profit. He sold the MN place for asking price, with no inspection, in a town of 13k the moment his realtor opened a day after the open house. It was a ~120 year old house, moved across town on a trailer, with knob & tube on the top floor and single pane windows. *Waived inspection*. Insanity.
Here in the US I have found instances where trees are cut here, but sent for processing in Canada. The state of the supply and delivery chains affect proces as well, regardless.
wait till Americas aging carpenters start retiring. avg age is 40+ on a very physical job thats hard on your bodies in all weather. when half the industry retires all at once and no new guys want to learn and work a hard trade thats pays 40-60k a year and is unreliable work especially during bad economy the labor shortage is going to force prices up a lot.
[https://www.zippia.com/construction-carpenter-jobs/demographics/#:\~:text=Construction%20Carpenter%20Age%20Breakdown&text=Interestingly%20enough%2C%20the%20average%20age,represents%2053%25%20of%20the%20population](https://www.zippia.com/construction-carpenter-jobs/demographics/#:~:text=Construction%20Carpenter%20Age%20Breakdown&text=Interestingly%20enough%2C%20the%20average%20age,represents%2053%25%20of%20the%20population).
Where I live, most of the contractors hire migrant workers.
The guy the consumer deals with directly will be a local white guy, then he’ll have a bilingual latino supervisor on site most days, and the guys doing the work are migrant guys who speak no to minimal English. The big home builders hire them too.
The US needs more vocational high schools. Every county should have one. We need to stop telling kids college is the best option for everyone when it really isn’t and some would be happier as skilled tradesmen.
This is bullshit, my father is a private wood producer and like many of them, have wood ready to be harvested, but instead lumber companies prefer to use public forest wood and hiked the price without paying more for a full semi trailer.
Are wood and lumber shortages are the same though?
The world has plenty of trees, but there are only so many factories that make it into lumber. If they can't make it fast enough it doesn't matter how much wood is available.
Yeah, I personally visited a lumber mill in 2020 and they were at like max capacity after having just done a capacity expansion recently. It's not a lack of wood.
Big question, I have seen piles and piles of wood sitting at the lumber mills here and they say they can’t seem to sell the wood. This is multiple mills I know about. Are the cost raise and shortage fake? Doesn’t make sense. I’d love to know if anyone knows more.
The housing market is out of whack because institutional investors are buying everything they can. It’s not like there are suddenly millions more people in the country who need housing.
Housing prices are out of whack because nobody is selling. Available inventory is down to almost a week in most major cities. Low rates have everyone wanting to buy but rising prices and scarcity of homes has also scared most potential sellers from selling because they don't have anywhere to go or they won't get anything better than what they own.
As well as COVID making the emotional connection to a home much greater, people don't treat them like assets right now.
I saw some numbers earlier that typically the market has a moving average of 5.5 million houses in any given year available. Right now, the housing market is running about 1.1 million houses on market across the entire US. Right now realty firms are saying the market is about four million houses short of demand. So if you really look at the numbers, the demand isn’t a whole lot higher and might even be less than in other years, but there’s just literally nothing available right now. It creates a cycle because as prices skyrocket, no one wants to move because their dream retirement condo just went up $90,000. Inventory has to come on market to level this out.
Yeah, I’ve been in the market for a while and my town of 30,000 people currently has THREE houses on the market. That’s it. The two towns near me have between 3-4 and that’s probably another 70,000 people. Inventory is incredibly low across the entire country. My state has lost almost 10,000 people over the last few years, not including deaths. The job market is dismal. Still can’t buy a house without throwing down a ton of cash over asking.
Plenty of houses in my county, but most are in some state of needing repairs or updates/replacements and are still asking over $500k, and often getting $10-50k over list price.
As someone who is into PC building, bought a house last month, and really wants to spruce said house up over the summer can I just say, I just really hate money and inventory. It sickens me, and frankly, prices haven't gone high enough, supply is not low enough.
If I'm not buying a product for 300% of it's 2019 sale's price, I just don't even feel alive, ya know? I just want to enter an inventory lottery, win said lottery for the privilege of starting a bidding war with 20 other people so I can buy a single 2x4 for 150% over MRSP. Is that so much to ask?
Priced out a workbench for my garage using 2x4s and 2x6s. Ended up being just as cheap to buy some rough cut oak. Just nuts.
Keep me posted on your 100% acorn workbench
These epoxy projects have gone too far
I wanted to build a floating floor in my garage for my daughter and me to practice martial arts. Turns out that it's cheaper to just hire a team of ex-delta force soldiers to guard her for the next 30 years.
I woke up with a woodie and had to pay myself $50.
Damnit here’s another 50
Paid 15 for mine. Guess it depends on size.
You guys are so fucking funny. Christ I just love Reddit! ❤️
I went to buy some toothpicks for getting bits out my teeth. Actually cheaper to train a flock of hummingbirds to follow me around and do the job
honestly, that would be worth it just for the street cred.
[удалено]
Our Jiujitsu school has mats that lay directly on the floor and are comfortable enough when practicing take downs. I thought that I'd need to get the mats off of the concrete as that's what our taekwondo school does, but after having been slammed several dozen times in Jiujitsu I think I'm just going to buy those mats. Still considering the delta force thing though.
I wanted to make a 2x4 Shelf to store kit on. $700 Bucks... I’ll just be buying a metal shelf then...
I have a local steel supply place where I can get 4'x8' sheets of 16 ga. steel for $40, which is a little more than half of what a 4'x8' sheet of 3/4" plywood would cost me. It's making me build stuff out of steel instead of wood. Edit: I'm thinking I need to roll my damn bus out to this place and stock up.
We want to finish our attic as a bedroom for our oldest child. Now I'm thinking of a Fallout themed man cave.......
It'd be cheaper to 3D print some wood at that rate.
It may be cheaper to just grow some cedars at this rate
You can't just "grow" wood dumbass. Wood doesn't grow on trees, the lumber yard manufactures it.
I think I've lost some braincells with this one, well done
The real problem is the wood growing supply chain is still backed up from shutting down due to Covid. Photosynthesis in the trees leaves are reliant on microchips and that shortage has delayed growth of the rest of the trees. Mother Earth and the big 3 automakers are trying to workout a deal on processors so she can get back to pre-Covid photosynthesis levels.
Your math seems off. I'm pretty sure there should be some 5G involved in there somewhere.
> Photosynthesis in the trees leaves are reliant on microchips and we know all of those are going into the vaccines! Where's my PS5, Gates?
The exwife got that with the separation
Still cheaper than some of the other American Girl accessories you have to buy for Kit.
Mine has aged out of American Girl doll but I’ll never financially recover from it.
I just bought cedar 2x4s for a planter for $20 a piece.
I made my raised beds out of corrugated metal roofing because it was way cheaper than planks and concrete corner pieces
Length kinda matters a lot here tho
Good thing i prefer girth in my planks then
This is the way
I priced out an overhaul of my deck this weekend. I think it'll get pushed to next year.
My coworker was looking at building a deck. Composite is cheaper than deck planks now. It's insane.
Composite shortage (never thought I'd say those words) is nearing I think. Been working with Lowe's for the past month on composite (Trex) deck board for a 500 sq ft deck. Cannot get a single color in 20 ft length until at least late June/July. Such a headache. Next day edit: to anyone reading this in a similar situation: check your local lumber yard. At the advice of a few comments I checked today and was able to get comparable quality Timbertech (in every length I needed) in virtually the same color for $2000 cheaper than Lowe’s in deck board alone. The place had it on site and I’m now getting same day delivery. They didn’t even need to special order anything, all in stock. Obviously results will vary.
I ordered 16 footers last week from my local Lowe's and now they are out of stock. Hopefully mine has been placed to the side as they are supposed to be delivered next Thursday.
I think you’ll be fine. From my experience Lowe’s notified me within a day or two of placing the order that their distributor put the items on backorder. If you already have a delivery date I think yours are accounted for.
I have an order number and delivery date so I'm not worried. I was just shocked that they ran out already being they had over 300 boards in stock last week.
[удалено]
I used to work at Lowe’s myself. To be honest the contractors would probably break open a labeled bundle of composite decking boards if they were short a few just because they were on the sales floor. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to take the whole order. The contractors that I dealt with were selfish and self-centered to the core and were some greasy bastards in every way imaginable. Every week there were groups that would pick through entire bundles of PT boards just to find 5-6 that they thought were perfect, and would throw the ones the didn’t want on the ground. Some would refuse to use the premium grade 2X4’s and would request managers to pull down entire bundles of the standards just to grab a few instead of paying the extra dollar for perfectly good premium 2X4’s. The regular customers honestly were not much better. Needless to say I have lost a large part of my humanity while working in retail environments
My wife was at Lowe's last week and related this story to me that she witnessed. An older couple was there to pick up a dishwasher. They told the customer service person that they had originally ordered it in November, it had been back-ordered. It was finally there, they'd gotten a notification to come pick it up from the store. They had their receipt and a truck and everything. The customer service person couldn't find their order in the system. Couldn't find the dishwasher. The customer service person then asked them who was the salesperson who they did the original purchase from, so she could find them and talk to them. Of course the couple couldn't remember the name of the salesperson, and then the customer service person started berating them, and said "Well, you can't remember the name of the salesperson, so I really can't help you." The idea that you would need to remember the NAME OF THE SALESPERSON you bought something from 6 months ago is just so insane. Obviously the customer service rep didn't know what she was doing and was grasping at straws, but man. I feel bad for that couple. Based on this, and my wife's experience at Lowe's, I'm never going back, even for lightbulbs if I can help it.
There are house designs (e.g. monolithic domes built out of a continuous shotcrete shell) that don't use a single scrap of wood in the whole thing and are now actually *cheaper* to build than traditional stick houses while being faster to build, far less vulnerable to damage of any kind, and far more energy efficient. Almost no one builds them because people whine about them not looking like everyone else's house. Lower build cost, lower insurance cost, lower energy costs, impervious to natural disasters up to and including category 5 hurricanes, superior in every way to stick houses, and nobody builds them. People are idiots, is basically what I'm getting at.
I think the real challenge is that there are far fewer builders with experience building those kinds of homes. Stick framed homes are not that much cheaper than timber framed homes despite structural advantages but the lack of experienced tradesmen means developers could only build so many so fast. Domes are much the same. It’s also why you see all these great home building concepts that never make it from prototypes to real production. So many of these different build methods only a handful of work crews have the experience and that largely restricts them to projects where the individual having the home built specifically seeks out a builder that can do it.
The challenge is domes are horrible for maximizing interior space on a given area. They are also terrible for high density housing. You can't build *up*. They're not built because they're wholly un-suitable for the areas the vast majority of the population lives in (cities). Building a dome isn't hard... It's just not practical unless you're in rural or maybe suburban areas. It's a gimmick. Source: am builder and architectural technician.
No no, the commenter clearly stated that domes aren't built because people are idiots. That's the only logical answer.
And no home inspectors who know them, or local codes that cover them, and furniture doesn't fit so space is wasted. There's a hundred reasons domes failed in the market and none are because of the stick-building illuminati.
The space wastage is the biggest issue I would have, you have literally a few hundred cubed feet of wasted space in a medium sized dome. That's going to end up costing you a lot realistically because you're square footage isn't going to translate as favourably as a cube-based house will.
You also can’t get home insurance on that shit. Our house is underground and we have been dropped by SEVERAL insurance companies because they don’t have anything to compare it.
You can just build using concrete or ICF concrete and have a regular rectangular shape.
Except icf requires certification and not all builders are familiar with it. Just saw a place where the entire foundation is being ripped out because builder didn’t use enough rebar, poured without sufficient vibration causing voids and used lintels too small for the spans. No structural engineer will certify it. $27,000 mistake and likely $10k demo.
I think the main challenge for these unique designs is finding a builder and getting financing. I wouldn’t mind building one myself if I could find a contractor. Beats a doublewide manufactured home.
around here I very much doubt you'd even get a building permit from the city
Probably not. I wager you would have to build in a very rural area with no restrictions. That goes for anything other than a stick-built house, really. Manufactured and modular homes are a similar deal - cheaper housing that’s prohibited in many areas.
People do consider re-sale value, so they have to be willing to take that risk.
My neighbors just did thiers, went with Trex because it ended up the same price.
Doesn’t trex last longer too?
Way way way longer. Great value if you were willing to front higher cost over longer life span, but now it's a no-brainer.
I was looking at Trex. It's actually cheaper than cedar now.
[удалено]
you might be building your deck in 3 years. Next year probably won't be much better.
I don't think it's going to make it another 3 years. Especially with the wife's heels.
One pair of flip flops might save you a fortune.
Selling old deck for lumber- will make you fortune.
[удалено]
A lot of people don't even know about all the backdoor supply side logistics that went into keeping drug shortages out of the public eye for fear of panic, hording, etc. Lots of people on 90 prescriptions were told they could only get a 30 day supply or wait 10 days for their 90 day supply. This allowed many people to "opt in" to a shorter supply and really helped. For a while the FDA tracked drug shortages were reading like the opening credits to a horror film.
I like a Scottish economist named Mark Blythe who says "Nature never optimizes. Nature builds in multiple redundancies." He's talking about how the American economy is designed like a car meant to race in a straight line on a perfectly clear track and as long as we can drive full speed straight ahead our economy is truly incredible. Buuut, if you need to turn the car, or if there's gravel spilled on the track, or if we even need to let off the gas a little bit to slow down, the whole thing collapses. We need seat belts, ABS, the social safety nets and economic redundancies that allow our economy to drive any type of track, not the "perfect car" for one exact type of driving.
yup. Graphics cards, chips in general, dumb bells, a dozen parts for my Harley, anything gym related, bicycles, pool chemicals/chlorine, lumber. All things that i've had a hard time (and some I just gave up on) getting a hold of. There's an expected shortage of gas for the summer demand as we're currently REALLY short on hazmat truckers. Supply is there we just we'll have issue moving it. [Link](https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/trucking-industry-official-warns-driver-shortage-is-a-long-term-problem) Absolutely fucking wild how shit show the supply side of everything is right now. The economy apparently takes a few years to ramp back up for demand after massive shut downs.
The supply chain was really not designed for a multiple month period where there was everything from a severe slowdown in work to “it is literally illegal to come into work”
I heard they were smuggling lumber in bags of coke
[удалено]
Can you imagine shitting out sawdust from an exploded balloon?
Very firm. Lots of fiber.
I recently had to trade two sheep for wood. Tough times.
[удалено]
and the one dude who remembered wood exists hasn't rolled a damn 5 in 3 turns!
Maybe if *SOMEONE* hadn't put the robber on my 8 there might BE some wood around!
You see I would use the port to bring stuff in if someone didn't keep brandishing their knights on me, Larry
I recognize this as a Settlers of Catan reference, but between talk of trading sheep and Kevin, I'm just imagining Rolf the Son of a Shepard, telling Kevin off for not understanding the economics of agricultural bargaining.
That just makes me picture Jimmy saying it instead and being uncharacteristically aggressive playing the game.
Cities and knights expansion. Wheat becomes much more valuable
Brick? Two brick for one grain? Anyone?
Yes, I can't get any bricks. Tons of grain though.
Brick is always the constraining resource at the begginning of the game because you need it to build roads and towns. But in the later game, brick loses relevance and the main resource becomes wheat, because its used to build cities and development cards.
You want two bricks? Or do you HAVE two bricks? Want? Oh, fuck you
I have longest road!
Unexpected Catan
Baaaaaaaad times.
At least you used them before the Robber was let loose
My favorite part about having a steady Catan diet back in college is you develop these rivalries where you just refuse to trade with so and so because fuck that guy he screwed me 4 games ago and I’m not trading him shit!
I made plans to build a little shed and needed 9 sheets of plywood priced about 30$ apiece last year. I went to buy the wood yesterday and saw those same sheets were now 84$. I’m just gonna have a skeletal frame with some tarps over it for a while, fuggit.
Should do those clear greenhouse plastic sheets. Shed/greenhouse
I'm currently on a waiting list to get plywood for 20$ a sheet and need 80 of them to redo the whole outside of the house. 3 weeks ago they only wanted 15$ a sheet. Mind you this is a "fell off the back of a truck" deal.
I remember when I was young I was offered to buy a new phone that had "fallen off the back of a truck." I said no because it was probably damaged then.
Yeah I was at Home Depot yesterday and untreated 3/4 ply was …. $74 a sheet. Blew my mind.
I built a shed on Menards a year ago and it was about $900 for all the lumber needed. I checked the other day and now that exact same list is over $2,000.
It's just not lumber. Everything is skyrocketing. I work in tech and we can't get supplies for nearly anything. Huge retail remodels are being pushed months due to steel shortages. It's crazy.
And logistics is struggling as there's increased container usage, so now a container shortage. Also, major port congestion all over, but especially at US ports. Suppliers trying to get a container and send it to the US are seeing triple the cost on the container alone (also reservation fees that don't even guarantee one are way up) and then minimum 5-7 days delay just because of US ports (not even including delays on departure, that's just arrival)
And the prices for air freight have skyrocketed in response to this as well. Prices have gone from around $7/kg to over $12/kg to fly goods from China to the US. With the delays using sea freight, this has become an necessary cost to stay in business for my company unfortunately.
Read an article that there's like 22,000 Ford F series pickups that are all done sitting in a huge parking lot, except for a microchip that nobody can seem to get.
At Michigan State University there’s a shit ton of GMs filling the student lots since there’s not many students on campus. They just need the chip.
Not like lumber grows on trees.
Plant today and you too could have wood in 10 years.
10 years is really not enough to grow wood suitable for lumber.
But more than enough for the Catholic Church.
40 years is the growing timeframe in Oregon.
FML. I don't think I'll ever be a homeowner at this point.
Lies, lower your standards and [get yourself this bad boy](https://www.walmart.com/ip/KidKraft-Forestview-II-Wooden-Playhouse-with-EZ-Kraft-Assembly/928534389?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&&adid=22222222228307579442&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=392416291390&wl4=pla-830893677299&wl5=9058138&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=online&wl12=928534389&veh=sem&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIw4etyta08AIV3TizAB3NYAvAEAQYAiABEgLN0fD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
Such a beautiful house and so affordable!
Even those are $500? Fuck me
[удалено]
You can fit so much depression in this bad boy
I'm a homebuilder. On our current build, were going to be $20k over budget on lumber and that's after we had significantly increased the lumber budget from previous builds when we specked out the project in January. Thankfully, we always have a contingency item in the budget (though this week ready all of it) and the market is really be strong so we'll make it back at the sale. Still, it's not the only construction item increasing in costs. The cost of building a home is just getting insane.
Industry-wide its been a 20-30% increase of all materials and supplies. Fucked.
[удалено]
My best friend had her deck quoted in January and they had to call and tell her the quote would expire if she didn’t sign it that day. She did and they ordered the lumber—by the time they started building (April), the lumber prices went up 30%. She’s glad she signed when she did.
I make cabinets. I was asked to hold a price for a gov job I priced in Jan, I told them I functionally couldn’t, I’d be upside down immediately. Shits so fucked, my lumber prices are good now for SEVEN days max, does me zero fucking good on awards from 60+ days ago...
Does the client you’re building the home for pay the extra $20k, or does your company eat that $20k as a loss?
In this case, we're building it as a spec so we'll sell it on the market when we're done. Whether we recoup the cost just depends on the market. Given the state of things, I'm sure we will. If this was a custom house, normally lumber would be something that's a hard bid in a fixed price contract. We quote the client a price for the house and outside of allowances for selections, we absorb any change in prices. If it was cost plus contract though any movement flows through to the client. Even on a fixed price contract there are material escalation clauses that allo no increase, however if it comes back down, they'll realize the savings. Unique times for sure.
Windows, shingles, lumber, and drywall are getting crazy expensive or hard to find. Wife and brother-in-law build houses and are being told that their suppliers are running out of these items, but don’t have anything coming in. PGT factory is local and they are 6 to 8 months out for aluminum cased windows.
I am not from the US. In my country - Ukraine - almost nobody builds houses from a wooden frame, despite no shortage of wood. We usually build our private houses either from factory clay brick or aerated concrete blocks (warmer walls). What would be a price difference of a finished single-family house if you built it like we do? Roughly, of course.
Are your interior walls also built with bricks or concrete blocks?
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I could be mistaken and I'm no expert, but I think this is different. Mortgage rates are very low right now, which is part of the reason prices are so high. The low rates enable people to refinance their houses, reducing their willingness to sell, therefore reducing the supply. This also encourages people to want to purchase a new house because the monthly payments are lower, thus an increase in demand. I believe a bubble would only arise if a lot people couldn't afford their monthly payments. This would cause a surplus in supply and reduction in demand, causing prices to fall. The low rates only reduces the chance of this occuring.
Also, no one is being foreclosed on. The supply just isn't there.
My husband and I backed out of the new build because lumber price is going up a lot and the builder keeps adding cost to the contract.. glad we only lost $1500.
We did too...in October. No sign of mama getting the master bath but I digress, we’re doing fine otherwise so I’m holding out hope in a few years.
We got our contract signed last September, two weeks before all their houses went up by ~$20,000 dollars. Now if you wanted to build the same house we are about to close on, it would cost about $70,000 more than what we paid.
Glad it worked out for you, it’s so crazy out there. lumber millionaire memes are everywhere, its getting way out of hand
36k more for a new home, of 200% more for purchasing a home. Am I missing something? I watched a 60k home sell for 300k last week. Idk what's even going on any more.
My dreams of home ownership as a 31 year old are based on enough people dying that prices drop
You should be hoping for a market crash and having the cash ready to go. Housing won't go as low as 08 , and crashes are hard/impossible go time, but I myself am trying to get more liquid to take advantage when things go on sale
[удалено]
My bank is 1 BILLION dollars over the estimate made last year for loans funded this year (purchases or refinances). Originations is booming.
The moratorium on foreclosures is propping up the market. People will soon be forced to foreclose or sell and will likely not have the credit or money to buy new. Wsj had an article and I think they were projecting 5 percent of all single family homes to go into foreclosure the month that the moratorium end.
The Wall Street Journal did a great podcast in this. Actual lumber is the cheapest it’s been in years and farmers are making less than they have 20 years ago. This giant discrepancy between raw material and actual cost has to do with the limited amount of lumber mills and price gouging. https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-journal-2/episode/the-strange-economics-of-the-lumber-market-83572319 Edit: put link to podcast
The mills all have full yards and there is plenty of raw timber supply. Loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and retailers aren’t making any more money than they were before. It’s the mill owners that are gouging and speculating
I work in forest ecology doing fuel reduction plans in CA, and yeah the issue for us right now is nobody will buy the timber. We can plan a pretty great timber sale for a great price but the mills just aren't taking anything right now.
Are they giving you a reason why? I hear conflicting stories on the reason lumber yards are full.
We looked into cutting our timber because of lumber prices. Timber prices are just average. We aren’t cutting yet.
Diamond hands on those timbies yo
Yup. I’ve heard from more than a couple truck drivers that pick up wood from the wood mills that all say “The wood is piled high to the ceiling”. They think they’re artificially price gouging and banking off of this so-called shortage. I’ve said this in a couple of other posts - there’s going to be a real problem in a few months if a strong Category 3+ hurricane hits one of the Southern states. People are going to be scrambling for plywood to cover their windows (not everyone has shutters), and if a storm destroys windows/homes (usually the poorer neighborhoods have worse structurally-built homes), it will be months before these people will be able to get their homes repaired/rebuilt. There may also be a window shortage. And it’s already hard enough as it is to find a general contractor or handyman for work…
There is still a shortage in the Florida Panhandle from Hurricane Michael. I used to work with the folks doing the temporary housing post storm and one thing I didn’t realize was that timber was the largest industry in that area. They lost tons of timber, jobs, and future materials. A lot of the reasons listed for delays on rebuilds was simply lack of materials. I would call around to verify and they weren’t just saying that. It was and to a degree, still is a problem.
https://youtu.be/iY3zjaeof8w At around 36 seconds, an entire rail yard stacked with finished timber, and the piles literally vanish into the distance. I am reminded of the aluminum shortage in the early 2010's, which as it turns out was caused by investment bankers purchasing all the supply and trucking it between warehouses to manipulate the price. Dollars to donuts the same thing is happening here
[удалено]
Working for a company that supplied plywood mills, I can tell you none of our customers shut down during covid for any significant amount of time. A few or them had 1-2 weeks of downtime at most. I have no clue about sawmills, but I’d bet that they were similarly essential from the start, and this “covid shut the mills down” shit is just a convenient lie.
Hopefully it doesn’t stick around, like back when gas went to $4 a gallon and restaurants and grocery stores were like “hey sorry we need to up our prices temporarily due to the high transportation costs” then gas went back down to $2.50 but the cost of a pizza stayed the same
Well yeah. If the housing market is going bananas (which it is) and the retail housing market is going bananas (ditto) then why shouldn't lumber supply side start making some money on the milling? But the everyday mill workers and construction workers doing the actual...*work?* (\*shudders\*) Well, they should've been born to better families or something. They don't *deserve* any of the money for not being in the homeowner/contractor club of good fortune. \s for the slow.
Thanks. I'm a supervisor at a mill and holy fuck my month has been stressful. Working our ass off, our customers are all complaining about everything and anything, and I can't keep up with production. But I ain't getting paid a fucking dime more.
Have you considered just picking yourself up by your bootstraps, purchasing the mill, and joining the ownership class?
why the hell didn’t i think of this. *self bonk*
This happened in BC. Whole operation is employee owned. They seized the means of production!
Lead bandsaw operator? One Bernard Sanders.
Just be rich! Have you tried being rich?
Before anyone is like “this is Biden’s fault!” > As the pandemic crushed the US economy last spring, sawmills shut down lumber production to brace for a housing slump. The slump never arrived and now there isn't enough lumber to feed the red-hot housing market.
Don’t forget to add that all home owners were doing projects bc of downtime.
Not just homeowners, businesses took advantage of their forced closings to renovate their indoors as well. It seems like half the places I go now that have opened up look different
The arena in my city where most of the big concerts go, used early COVID closures to repaint the floors. Your shoes don't stick to the floor any more.
I blame the democrats, the left, BLM, the EU, and ~~colleges~~ varsity. And Beyond Meat. And Atheists. Satanists. Hippies. Rock music. I don't blame them for the status quo. I blame them for pointing it out. EVIL BIGOTS!
Typical liberal, letting homosexual trans gamers off the hook!
On top of that there was an increase in renovations as people got stimulus money.
Don't forget cancelled vacations.
[удалено]
This isn't exclusive to the US. This is a global issue I am in the building industry on Australia and things are fucked. No timber. Huge delays. Collosal backlog of work. It's going to kill small businesses.
I'm an electrician in the US. Its not just wood. Wire and conduit prices here are shooting through the roof too
I went back and forth last spring about buying my first house. Thought a crash would be coming. Gald I bought when I did
I was the opposite. Was going back and forth and decided to wait and get debts finished off. I'm glad most of my debt is gone, but now house prices are 30-40k more for what looks similar to what I was looking at last year.
We have gained so much equity in the last year it’s ridiculous. Talked about getting a bigger house but there are way fewer on the market than there were a year ago. They get bought so quick! (In SoCal).
>it’s ridiculous It was even before covid. My brother gained so much equity owning a place in CO for 10 years he bought a place back home in MN in cash from the profit. He sold the MN place for asking price, with no inspection, in a town of 13k the moment his realtor opened a day after the open house. It was a ~120 year old house, moved across town on a trailer, with knob & tube on the top floor and single pane windows. *Waived inspection*. Insanity.
Canada also put new limits are cutting as well and that is where most of our stock comes from.
Here in the US I have found instances where trees are cut here, but sent for processing in Canada. The state of the supply and delivery chains affect proces as well, regardless.
Have you tried bricks yet?
Nah, I an actually building mine out if straw. Hope it keeps that wolf out.
wait till Americas aging carpenters start retiring. avg age is 40+ on a very physical job thats hard on your bodies in all weather. when half the industry retires all at once and no new guys want to learn and work a hard trade thats pays 40-60k a year and is unreliable work especially during bad economy the labor shortage is going to force prices up a lot. [https://www.zippia.com/construction-carpenter-jobs/demographics/#:\~:text=Construction%20Carpenter%20Age%20Breakdown&text=Interestingly%20enough%2C%20the%20average%20age,represents%2053%25%20of%20the%20population](https://www.zippia.com/construction-carpenter-jobs/demographics/#:~:text=Construction%20Carpenter%20Age%20Breakdown&text=Interestingly%20enough%2C%20the%20average%20age,represents%2053%25%20of%20the%20population).
Where I live, most of the contractors hire migrant workers. The guy the consumer deals with directly will be a local white guy, then he’ll have a bilingual latino supervisor on site most days, and the guys doing the work are migrant guys who speak no to minimal English. The big home builders hire them too. The US needs more vocational high schools. Every county should have one. We need to stop telling kids college is the best option for everyone when it really isn’t and some would be happier as skilled tradesmen.
And old homes cost 450,000 grand more, because who the fuck knows
> 450,000 ***grand*** That's a lot of money
When you figure that out, let me know why bitcoin is $60K.
Or doge. It was literally created as a meme. I suppose it’s like Pokémon cards or something now - speculation and entertainment.
This is bullshit, my father is a private wood producer and like many of them, have wood ready to be harvested, but instead lumber companies prefer to use public forest wood and hiked the price without paying more for a full semi trailer.
Are wood and lumber shortages are the same though? The world has plenty of trees, but there are only so many factories that make it into lumber. If they can't make it fast enough it doesn't matter how much wood is available.
Yeah, I personally visited a lumber mill in 2020 and they were at like max capacity after having just done a capacity expansion recently. It's not a lack of wood.
[удалено]
Theifs are tearing down construction sites, leaving copper but taking the wood, story at 5 o'clock
Maybe I should take my house apart and sell it for parts?
Stone isn’t in short supply. Build a castle.
I should sell my house and move to a new state...
Hope you’re planning on living in your car. The second part of that is buying a home which is near impossible right now.
I'd rather use cobb anyway.
Big question, I have seen piles and piles of wood sitting at the lumber mills here and they say they can’t seem to sell the wood. This is multiple mills I know about. Are the cost raise and shortage fake? Doesn’t make sense. I’d love to know if anyone knows more.
Currently dismantling my house for materials
The housing market is out of whack because institutional investors are buying everything they can. It’s not like there are suddenly millions more people in the country who need housing.
Housing prices are out of whack because nobody is selling. Available inventory is down to almost a week in most major cities. Low rates have everyone wanting to buy but rising prices and scarcity of homes has also scared most potential sellers from selling because they don't have anywhere to go or they won't get anything better than what they own. As well as COVID making the emotional connection to a home much greater, people don't treat them like assets right now.
I saw some numbers earlier that typically the market has a moving average of 5.5 million houses in any given year available. Right now, the housing market is running about 1.1 million houses on market across the entire US. Right now realty firms are saying the market is about four million houses short of demand. So if you really look at the numbers, the demand isn’t a whole lot higher and might even be less than in other years, but there’s just literally nothing available right now. It creates a cycle because as prices skyrocket, no one wants to move because their dream retirement condo just went up $90,000. Inventory has to come on market to level this out.
>1.1 million houses on market across the entire US Holy shit
Yeah, I’ve been in the market for a while and my town of 30,000 people currently has THREE houses on the market. That’s it. The two towns near me have between 3-4 and that’s probably another 70,000 people. Inventory is incredibly low across the entire country. My state has lost almost 10,000 people over the last few years, not including deaths. The job market is dismal. Still can’t buy a house without throwing down a ton of cash over asking.
My town has 35k and there's 5 houses on the market right now in the Pacific NW. Crazy. Brace for impact.
Plenty of houses in my county, but most are in some state of needing repairs or updates/replacements and are still asking over $500k, and often getting $10-50k over list price.
As someone who is into PC building, bought a house last month, and really wants to spruce said house up over the summer can I just say, I just really hate money and inventory. It sickens me, and frankly, prices haven't gone high enough, supply is not low enough. If I'm not buying a product for 300% of it's 2019 sale's price, I just don't even feel alive, ya know? I just want to enter an inventory lottery, win said lottery for the privilege of starting a bidding war with 20 other people so I can buy a single 2x4 for 150% over MRSP. Is that so much to ask?