Jennifer Rodgers has always dreamed of building a new home.
She lived in Copley for some 20 years and sold her home in September to temporarily move in with her fiancé, Mike, in Maple Heights while they build a new home in Stow.
Rodgers, who turned 60 not that long ago, said they have been dreaming and planning to build for about two years.
A few things they didn’t plan for were a pandemic and the price of building materials to soar through the roof.
The cost of building supplies — if you can find them — is at or near record highs.
The financial blow has been softened some, Rodgers said, thanks to low interest rates, but even those are starting to creep up.
Working for a bank, Rodgers said, she’s always been a bit thrifty and is one to save up and prepare for unexpected expenses.
But even she was surprised when a letter from the couple’s builder arrived in the mail not too long ago announcing a “change order” to the tune of $19,000 because of the rising cost of building materials for their dream ranch retirement home.
“It was just poof — out of thin air,” Rodger said.
Building business booming
The pandemic has brought its fair share of surprises to everyone.
When the state-ordered shutdowns hit last spring, Darren Shultz of Shultz Design and Construction feared the worst.
The company feared that construction projects would shut down and jobs would dry up.
The exact opposite happened.
Projects already underway continued and then the phones started ringing with more and more work.
The family-owned business specializes in larger remodels and new home construction around the Portage Lakes.
The main concern, Shultz said, was not so much the coronavirus — knock on wood — but rather finding enough skilled workers to complete the jobs and the supplies needed to do them.
It seems working from home spurred folks to dream up remodeling projects — from decks to home offices to even major additions.
And the flow of stimulus checks into bank accounts, coupled with canceled vacations saving folks even more money, made more and more homeowners tackle ambitious improvement projects.
This helped take some of the “ouch” out of quotes for projects, Shultz said, as soaring prices on everything from lumber to simple building supplies like a door knob have driven up final tabs.
“Sales are up,” he said. “Demand is up. We are like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ “
Given the scarcity of supplies, Shultz said, the company has been forced to get a bit creative and use different materials and even dimensions of boards used to frame up exterior walls to eliminate some studs.
He said they had been talking with one homeowner in particular for about two years for a remodeling project.
In that time, the cost of the project has risen by 25{911ea05452e114f1778c76ca86733b6032c246f8f651bb1f01d12abf04b54efb} just from the cost of the building materials.
The rising costs have not deterred most homeowners from forging ahead, Shultz said, pointing to the fact the phone keeps ringing with folks interested in starting a new project.
In his travels as the president of the Home Builders Association of Portage and Summit counties, he’s hearing the same thing from others.
“By no means is lumber prices going up all doom and gloom,” he said.
Lumber, materials sold before hitting shelves
It doesn’t look like there’s a lumber scarcity when you walk around the yard at Graves Lumber Co. in Copley.
Lumber and building pieces and parts fill the large open storage barns.
But that doesn’t mean every piece and part isn’t accounted for, President Ed Belair said.
Long before a rail car rumbles up with lumber from Canada or a truck rolls in from a factory that makes windows, Belair said, these items already have been sold.
There is no stock simply collecting dust anymore.
A couple of decades ago, Graves, which started in 1899 in downtown Akron making mirrors with exotic wooden handles of all things, closed its commercial lumber yards in places like Streetsboro and Medina and consolidated its business on Cleveland-Massillon Road.
The core of its business now is providing lumber and building materials for larger home builders and commercial contractors.
Graves Lumber, whose fourth-generation Keith Graves is at the helm, provides materials and expertise for projects from Michigan to Columbus to Pittsburgh and everywhere in between.
And with the scarcity of supplies, Belair said, even with the large volume of material that comes in and out of his yard, he’s even having trouble keeping up with the demand.
What’s driving building material shortages?
Belair attributes the scarcity to a lot of factors.
One was the slowdown in the construction of new homes dating back to the Great Recession of 2008, when everything in the sector ground to a halt.
The construction of new homes has lagged behind ever since.
And then the pandemic hit.
This wreaked havoc on everything.
Some mills shut down.
Factories that supply the pieces and parts for construction material shuttered, too.
The virus hit workers, creating more delays among the mills and factories still open.
And then there was that deep freeze in Texas.
This chill created power outages and frozen pipes in factories that make critical ingredients for everything from the pigments used to color siding to the resin that keeps the wood particles together in construction boards.
And there’s that unpredictable human nature factor. When things seemed bleak at the height of the pandemic, instead of hunkering down, many homeowners went on a home improvement spending spree, Belair said.
Prices for some boards that were just $8 a year or so ago now fetch $40.
“It’s insane,” he said. “And now you can’t even find some of the materials.”
The prices and scarcity of lumber have spilled over to other building materials, too.
Prices are up on everything, Belair said, and windows that could be ordered and delivered within three weeks can now take up to eight weeks to arrive.
“It’s really a bizarre situation,” he said.
It is getting so tough to procure lumber, Belair said, they are even in the weird position of turning away potential new clients.
“It is just gut wrenching to work through this,” he said.
Talking to other folks in the industry, Belair said, the “unhinged” lumber and building supply market will likely not calm down and get back to some semblance of a new normal until 2022.
“It’s a challenging time for everyone,” he said.
Craig Webb can be reached at [email protected].
