Sky high lumber prices caused by the pandemic have had an impact on Joplin’s Create N Sip Studios by making popular do-it-yourself wooden signs unaffordable.
“I would be offering a lot more wood classes. It’s really hard for me to keep up with the inventory on it to be able to offer it as often as I once was. And so it’s now mainly a specialty kind of class and offered to only private parties,” said Create N Sip’s owner, John Coleman.
But this could be a temporary situation for the art studio and others who rely on affordable lumber.
The Wall Street Journal reports that futures for July delivery ended Tuesday at almost $1,010 per thousand board feet, down 41% from the record of a bit over $1,711 which was reached in early May.
And as for the prices that distributors pay from sawmills, Fortune.com says that the cash price of lumber is down 20% from the all-time high set on May 28.
But the operation manager of Pittsburg’s Broadway Lumber warns consumers that won’t translate into an immediate price drop at your local lumber yard.
“The futures are (a prediction of) the future. The current prices will not reflect that immediately, obviously,” said Broadway Lumber Operation Manager Byron Boldrini.
But that doesn’t mean lower store prices won’t eventually come back to customers as the lumber market stabilizes, which is what Boldrini thinks is behind the current price and futures drop.
“It’s a calming down of events that have just skyrocketed over the last several months. Now, people are just becoming more cautious and a lot of large buyers have decided to take it easy and therefore, stabilize the price because the demand has gone down,” said Boldrini.
And if the market stays calm with lumber prices lowering at the lumber yard, wooden sign classes and a whole lot more will come back to Create N Sip.
“Once prices get down, I’ll be able to afford to offer up more of the projects that I used to and even add some of the ones that I thought about adding before this situation happened,” said Coleman.
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