Supply chain disruptions have hit wood products hard.
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Acrylic is also more expensive too. $21 a sheet now for acrylic.
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Now may be the time to talk about inexpensive sources of MDF, which is all that draftboard is:
And in general, check out #2 and #1A:
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The cost of wood has soared due to the pandemic, adding $24,000 to the cost of building a house this year. 
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Yup. I’m actually surprised that they were able to keep prices flat for the past year - they were the only supplier that I use to do so. Supply chain and raw material costs finally caught up to the them. Sad but inevitable.
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It was announced ahead of time:
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You may have noticed a lot of acrylic sneeze guards, well, everywhere since March 2020. Shortages have been rampant across acrylic suppliers, too. 
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Here’s a salient point for the TL;DR crowd:
So you’ll see prices for most things go way up, but we will start having monthly sale prices where we’ll sell selected products at the lowest price we can.
This is not a guarantee that there will always be something on sale, but it will be worth keeping an eye on the Shop. 
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hey! no stalking!
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I just placed an order on Thursday-just in time. I knew they were having to raise them so glad I got under the wire!
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honestly, it just makes me glad i’m not beholden to PG and i use lots of other sources. they’ve gone up in price (although i haven’t bought a ton in the past year) but not nearly that much.
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I am a buyer for manufacturing and it hit hard for everyone. I’m not familiar for wood but for plastics. Resin to make plastics are in short supply. I’m surprised that Glowforge were able to keep the same as low as it was. I’m in Canada but plastics here increased too
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While I routinely use other materials most of the year, my holiday products are mostly PG to save on testing / adjusting time and waste. It really pays off to read the monthly announcements, too. As soon as I saw the announcement, I placed an order for my estimated holiday needs:
This stack of assorted PG just went from $340 to a street value of $750! Buying early will allow me to keep my prices lower, rather than passing along the increase to my customers.
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Great idea. I barely made it before it went up!!
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My current thinking is…never put off until tomorrow what you can purchase today. (Started that about a year ago. Can’t move in this blasted storage barn of a house now.) 
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Actually I think in May when the softwoods futures hit their peak, it was 36K for the average new house.
Our house build has dropped 22K in the time it took the designer to get the first drawings done. Talking to the builder last week he expects it to drop another 20+ before he’s going to be ready to start framing and potentially another 30 or so before we’re done.
The latest prices are half the peak. Still twice what it was 2 years ago but demand just tanked after the runup. Lots of people now going on vacations vs staying home & remodeling and builders cutting back on spec houses because they don’t want to be stuck in an overprice situation where the house value doesn’t come up to what it cost them to build. It takes about 6 - 8 weeks for the futures prices to work their way into the stores but things appear to be settling down. Of course, it would be helpful if we killed the tariffs we imposed on Canadian lumber but that’s not showing any signs of happening.
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last story i saw (last night) on a business site about lumber futures said we were looking at not much lower than current level for the next five years or so. that it wasn’t going to drop back the pre-pandemic pricing.
That’s true ($400/1000bdf) but most people in the industry (& traders) are figuring it’s got another couple hundred to drop before finding the new normal. The pre-pandemic price was depressed due to lower building starts from 2008. We won’t see $15 sheets of plywood but $20-25 is likely which is a far cry from the current $80 price at the big box stores. If the Canadian tariffs get repealed, it should drop some more due to the volume of wood (the bulk of softwoods used in the US actually come from the Canadian NW).
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Where are you building?
The wood prices are coming down (hallalujah!) because we finally popped the wood bubble. People decided they weren’t going to move because they couldn’t afford to build. But we’ve seen nothing but price increases coming down the pipe, and the average customer has no idea they are going to hit them yet. Availability is already tanking…the lead out on appliances, china, pipe, and things like water heaters is bad now, and will get worse. For at least a couple of years or more. 
Keep a really close eye on your costs…I’m afraid the consumer price is going to pull a kangaroo within a month or two. I know, I’m not guessing…we’ve been coding the price sheets for the wholesalers. As they sell whatever inventory they have on hand, the price is going to jump. We’ve been hit with 25 price increases in the last couple of months for the few lines that we represent, and the prices have jumped from 12% to over 200% on the different products. (Wholesale…the consumer price will be higher. And that’s before considering shipping costs…a container has jumped from $1500 to over $10,000. For one miserable freaking container.)
Really rough numbers:
20-30% increase on steel, metal and iron (appliances)
40% increase on water heaters, and low availability (limiter is the foam insulation which got creamed during the TX freeze.)
200% increase on PVC pipe/fittings/ plastics (including acrylics)
12% increase on china (now is a good time to pick out your toilet and lavatories, but those will be hit by the shipping costs.)
I wouldn’t want to try to build a single family dwelling right now…the things needed might not be available if it hasn’t already started. Priority is currently directed to multiple family units like apartments or condos, to house the families who will be displaced due to the shut downs. (Expected as soon as Biden lifts the restriction on mortgage holders…people will be getting turfed. They will need a place to live. Builders know this, and they are focusing on multi-family units now…they have to be ready before it happens. Going to be exceptionally bad in and around larger cities.)
Granted, this might just be in the Texas area, because we’ve had a tremendous flood of incoming transplants. Might be better in a small town.
I’m just tired these days. 
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