On a lighter note today (well not lighter, just less political I suppose) Lumber prices are going through the roof... I've been watching it climb up all summer to heights I've never seen before... I never really got into the why's of the rise, since really I don't have much choice about paying for it. CNN gave me a bit of insite today on this due to Hurricane Isabel tracking toward the US...
There are a few causes right now, and I'll have to make it a point to see if these are in fact what are doing it, but they seem sound at the moment...
Well I didn't check the rainfall in the southern states, but I'll take their word for that... I've done a good deal of work in the woods, cutting and skidding trees for firewood and hardwood lumber, and yes, when its wet, its a nightmare.
The Defence Department certianlly has bought a chunk of lumber... The number CNN quotes is 50 million... That's not all that much really in the grand scheme of things... So I'll chalk that up as a minor cause...
The cut back inventories I can attest to... It seemed to me at its worst in the spring, though the summer is slow for me, so I buy less then... I haven't run across so many yards being out of my staple products before... I could get a few sticks of things then and have to wait for a week to get the rest... Usually I call, and the next day everything is there... Now, the thing to keep in mind is that most of what I use is not what you find most commonly in the building industry... We use smaller, lighter, and nicer finish stuff... So when they decide to cut inventory, they ditch my material first as we're a tiny market compared to construction...
CNN claims a record number of houseing starts in July... I'll have to trust them on that as I'm too lazy right now to verify it... I certianlly didn't see that around here, but then there isn't much room left for a big houseing build to happen... Around here there was just a massive number of homes being bought and sold...
The fires out west... Now this I really don't buy into... There are fires out west every year... I do not see a spike every year due to fires... Perhaps a mill or two got burned though I didn't hear about it... That might spike the price a bit...
Perhaps the lumber companies are haveing to pay more in insurance due to the ELF idiots... That would trickle down to me eventually... If that's the case, I hope they just start dropping trees on the Elves... Poetic justace..."ELF killed by tree" (or better yet... "ELF killed by Bush")
Posted by Backstage at September 14, 2003 07:33 PM