Why Is Lumber So Expensive Right Now?

My husband and I spent last weekend helping our neighbors re-build their deck and there were a few times that we had to get creative because we knew that we couldn’t risk making any mistakes because the price of lumber is astronomical, and having to buy replacement pieces was not something any of us wanted to do.

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Lumber prices have soared in the last few months and it isn’t just people doing little weekend projects that are being impacted. According to the National Association of Home Builders, “the price of lumber has jumped a staggering 180 percent in the last year and, This price spike has caused the price of an average new single-family home to increase by more than $24,000...”

So, why the jump in the cost of lumber? There are a couple of factors (including something to do with a beetle) but the biggest is that when the pandemic started a year ago, a lot of lumber mills were forced to close which brought production to an abrupt stop.

As people started to realize that they were going to be spending a whole lot more time at home whether they wanted to or not, they decided being suck at home in a pandemic meant that it would be a great time to either start or finish all kinds of projects that required the use of lumber.

Because the mills were forced to shut down in the early days of the pandemic, a major strain was put on the existing supply of lumber available at stores and since there was a huge demand for lumber but not a big supply, the price shot up and here we are a year later and the mills are still playing catch up.