Home Improvement Projects In Western New York Are About To Be More Expensive

If you are one of the many people who started home improvement projects but didn't get them done because you ran out of lumber, you might have to pay a little bit more this year to get it done.
A lot of us were sitting at home during the pandemic and noticing things that we wanted to fix or get done. Hardware stores were considered "essential" and so it began. All those little projects that we never could find the time for before were about to get tackled.
But if you went to the hardware store looking for lumber, you might have come up short. It was in short supply. To find lumber of a certain size proved to be tough. So maybe you put that one on the back shelf.
Now, they're saying that holding off might end up costing you more this summer. There is a nationwide price hike happening with lumber. According to WIVB, it's because they are short staffed at the lumber mills. Due to COVID restrictions and social distancing, they can only have so many people on the clock at the same time. They're saying that it is roughly doubled where prices were pre-COVID about a year ago.

“The mills are not able to reach full capacity for COVID reasons, social distancing, sick people not being able to get people back from layoffs a year." - Scott Fields, President and General Manager of Matthew and Fields Lumber in Rochester

As the supply continues to go down, the demand is going to go up...and so are the prices. If you're thinking about doing any projects this summer, I'd get them started as soon as possible.