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The price tag on cedar lumber made me do a double take last weekend
I stopped by the lumber yard in Tacoma on Saturday to grab a few boards for a raised garden bed, and nearly fell over when I saw 2x6 cedar going for almost $14 a piece. My dad and I built our first deck back in 1998, and I swear we paid like $3.50 for the same size. I spent a good ten minutes just standing there in the aisle, trying to figure out if it was inflation or just the crazy demand from all the new builds around here. Ended up going with regular treated pine for the bed and saved about half, but the cedar smell is one of those things I miss from growing up. Has anyone else noticed prices on specific woods jumping way more than others this season, or is it just cedar going nuts in the Pacific Northwest?
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grantp146d ago
My neighbor down in Olympia dropped $200 on cedar fence boards last month for a tiny little gate project, and he said the guy at the checkout told him cedar imports from Canada got hit hard by some beetle thing. I mean, we went through this same mess with pressure treated lumber back in 2021 when prices basically doubled overnight, but this feels different. I actually ended up building my garden beds out of free pallets I found behind the grocery store, and honestly they look fine after a coat of stain. Maybe it's just me but the whole wood market feels like it's guessing right now, one week pine is cheap, the next week it's through the roof. I keep telling myself I'll just wait for winter when demand slows down, but it never really does around here.
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