Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

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plywood at my local home depot is still very much at its highest price ever when I checked last week ($135 for a 1-1/8" 4x8 sheet of t&g subfloor)

> There's "we bought a sawmill!" ads here in the rural lands now for fresh sawn green pine and oak; which isn't "lumber" yet in any useful sense. I've seen porches being built that won't last the summer.

The allegedly "kiln dried lumber" home depot has been selling has been criminally wet throughout the last year too. Not only have people been paying through the nose for the stuff, it's been nowhere near ready to use. I had to let boards I bought for building gambrel rafters sit for a month on my covered deck before attempting to cut them to the pattern. And even after that, a bunch of them shrunk another 1/4" from the pattern in the subsequent month of waiting for me to install. Infuriating to pay so much for stuff that isn't even top quality and ready to go. I also had to throw a few away from splitting and twisting during the drying process...

KD-HT is a pretty standardized, commodity product. I used to work at a lumber yard on their Heat Treat process. I am pretty sure that the lumber I see at Home Depot are the same lumber that I use to work on. It's not like they have their own mills and ovens. They buy the same commodity lumber like everyone else.

TBH, the lumber yard I worked at you to flood. We would have bundled stacks of lumber float all across the yard. We can pretty much take them the next day and ship them to a construction site. KD-HT lumber is pretty good like that.

Now, most of our large customers just have a reasonable expectation of the product. It's wood. It's gonna warp. It's gonna split. It's like most things like fresh fruits, or meat, or leather. There is a lot of variability.

> criminally wet throughout the last year too

That is not a recent thing. Home Depot wood has been dripping wet for many years. It's routine to put a screw into it and have water running past the head as you tighten it. I typically buy 50-100% more than I expect to use on the assumption that a good chunk of it will warp as it dries and become useless.

Most of my big diy home construction projects happened to overlap with the pandemic, and when I described the wet lumber problems to a local with more building experience he was so confident their lumber was properly kiln dried he attacked my ability to measure and cut properly...

I'm not sure if I should feel better or worse about the situation knowing home depot has been doing this long before the pandemic.

I'm pretty sure it's common knowledge that the lumber from the big (blue and orange) box stores is incredibly lacking in quality.

That wood from Stimson is the worst ever. I don't think you can buy worse. I've used all sorts in my life and HD consistently has lumber that cannot even be used to start fires until you dry it.

Plywood is fine, but if you need anything you build to last, buy pressure treated at HD, or buy plain lumber somewhere else.

(I bought some 2x4s for a non-permanent project during the pandemic. It was so soft and wet that when I fired a railgun into one of the pieces, the nail went all the way through. That should not happen)

Whenever I go to Lowes, I always like to go by the lumber section (even when I'm not there for lumber) just to see how warped the dimensional lumber is. It's always a depressing experience.

Just making sure you're not buying the pressure treated wood?

HD sells pressure treated wood that's then kiln dried (KDAT), if you would like to open up a large line of credit with them.

No, just garden variety 2x4x8 kiln-dried studs. Normally a few bucks apiece but going for closer to ten right now.

YMMV, but for people who need actual kiln-dried wood it's usually a better option to go to a real lumber yard.

Oddly the good stuff wasn't much affected. I was making a work bench and picked up a 4x8 of red oak plywood for under $60 in May. Not what I would normally use but half the price.

Yeah, this is strange, especially as red oak plywood is mostly the same thing as normal plywood, the red oak is just a thin veneer on the face. I've been buying cherry lumber recently, and they went from something like $4.50/bf to $6.50/bf here. Significant increase, but not 3-fold.

Now that I think of it, it kinda makes sense: it's not the timber that's gotten more expensive, but the service of milling it. For products from relatively more expensive hardwood timber, milling costs constitute smaller fraction of the final cost, so even if milling costs triple, the final product might only go by 50%.

FWIW, substitutability is a hard problem with algorithmic pricing, even for relatively stable inventory categories like big box construction retail.

I'd guess (with some insider knowledge) that (1) there wasn't any prebuilt link to adjust substitute pricing & (2) Depot didn't care enough to adjust pricing.

Both Depot and Lowes are in it for volume and long-term, which is why they don't do things like spike generator prices after hurricanes.

It's more than just that. You can see weird price changes like this because of the limits of substitution.

Imagine you've got a project to build a bookcase. You're using cheaper normal plywood for hidden structural parts and nicer but more expensive red plywood for the stuff people will see. You price the whole thing out.

Then the price of wood skyrockets. To keep the price of the whole project under control, you start cutting costs. You use more of the cheaper plywood for the whole project and decide to skimp on the red oak.

Scale that across many projects and you get a paradoxical result where the cheapest goods in a category go up in price while the better goods don't, because people are subbing out the "cheap" stuff for the good stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

A friend of mine in CT has problem now in the hardwood supply chain. The issue is that the kiln drying backlog has now caught up with hardwoods as many kilns are full of fir and pine. The supplies of paint grade poplar and soft maple are running quite low now.

I was in Home Depot a couple of days ago (in Western Massachusetts). Crappy 19/32 CDX was $85 for a 4x8 sheet. Sitting right next to it was 3/4" oak veneer at $60. I think it would be pretty funny to sheath a house in sort of cabinet grade plywood (it is 7 ply Purebond which usually has a couple of voids per sheet).

The problem is that the glue in the oak veneer plywood isn't really suitable for exterior applications like that. If it ever gets wet you're hosed.

Modern glues in exterior plywood and OSB-like products are amazing, but they don't use that in oak plywood.

Those are definitely not substitutable. In addition to the difference in glues the peer comment notes (the oak plywood will likely delaminate if exposed to moisture), you need to sheathe a house in a product rated for that use. That oak veneer doesn't have a span rating stamped on it, so any inspector would fail you.

Yeah, prices are still ridiculous. Apparently it takes a couple months for the aforementioned price drops in futures to trickle down. If HD bought it for 100, they ain't gonna sell it for 50 regardless of what sawmills are doing(unless of course forced to with overstock and such).

If the market-clearing price that their competitors are selling it for is $50, they’ll sell it for around $50 or they won’t sell it.

You two are saying the same thing. If they won't sell due to an uncompetitively high price, then they'll have overstock. Then they'll be "forced to" sell lower.

I’m saying they’ll do it even if they’re just normally (or even partially) stocked with material. They know their customers are cross-shopping them with other stores, they need to be competitive, and they don’t want to lose the rest of the order lines nor train customers that they’re not competitively priced.

I consider that covered under 'and such' but, it's not so simple.

There's about four layers between the chainsaw and the consumer. So HD, Lowes, etc all exist at layer 4, sometimes 3 and 4. None of them are going to price cut below what they paid. Call it a gentleman's agreement, or common sense.

What you'll most likely see is buying from layer 3 at say, 50, and selling both 100 and 50 dollar wood together at 75.

> The allegedly "kiln dried lumber" home depot has been selling has been criminally wet throughout the last year too.

Eh it’s always been that way. Warped and with plenty of knots too. It was considered poor quality back when a 2x4 cost $2.50.

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