ICF Costs compared to Falling Lumber Prices... August update

okay guys um it's uh storming pretty good outside right now so we're not getting a ton of work done on our light deck project in our backyard but you can at least see it in the background there so i thought today what i would do i've got a bunch of videos kind of in about half done but it's been so hot we've got so many pools going that i didn't really have a finished video so i thought it would be a good time it's been a couple months since my last video about um specifically lumber prices and icf versus lumber in price so this will be my third one i said i would revisit it every month or so it's been about two and thus far i would say it's sort of a good news bad news situation um starting with lumber you probably hear on the news and everything that the lumber futures are falling and they're falling dramatically and that's a good thing but what does that correlate to to if you're gonna go buy a two by four at the lumber yard um so i'm gonna give that to you guys right now but first i'll talk about the futures and as you remember from like the first video i ever did on this subject i told back in about january of 2020 right at the beginning of the pandemic lumber futures were and that's lumber futures are based on a thousand random board feet of dimensional lumber and they were about 350 dollars for a thousand board feet and that's kind of it had been pretty steady and lumber prices were pretty good i think most people thought and by may of 2021 the first week of may they had hit 1700 so they were up like almost five times it's terrible um and that's when lumber and everything had really we thought peaked but it kept going up at the store for another couple months um when i did my second video in late may of 2021 we were sitting at 1400 it had dipped as low as 1200 but the futures were still at 1400 and those were july futures at the end of may so today we are at 621 dollars and 20 cents and that's september futures so they are down by over half from two months ago they're still almost double what they were a year and a half ago so good news bad news the really bad news is it really hasn't correlated to a ton of savings yet at the store level now sheet goods are the biggest part of the problem still and that's more based on a resin shortage theoretically mythically whatever you want to say um the osb and stuff is still insanely high and while that's high it's going to keep your overall lumber package up a lot on stick frame houses but it's still light at the end of the tunnel that resin shortage is based a lot i think on the texas freeze and wrecking a couple resin plants that are taking a while to get back online and even once they're back online it's going to take a while to catch up um but the big problem is the futures their futures so these prices here 621 is what they can buy for and take delivery in september not today um so what they're doing now is buying stuff that you know from you know their their july futures were still well over a thousand twelve thirteen hundred and they've bought all that lumber and that's what's sitting on their shelves so they don't wanna take a loss on it it's just like gas prices you know somebody you know farts on a oil tanker and the futures go up 20 or the wind blows too hard in the gulf of mexico i don't know the futures go up and the price the pumps up before you get out of bed that morning you know 20 or whatever and then it goes down one percent at a time as they have to because they buy it high and they don't want to sell it low they don't mind selling it high when they bought it low but it's just human nature they don't want to lose money so the big boxes are going to hold on to those prices as long as they can until some of the smaller lumber yards that weren't heavily stocked because they were buying only what they needed start beating them and they are right now normally you're going to buy you're going to pay a little bit more of a premium at a local lumber yard but they're going to deliver for free this all their people are going to be competent and know what they're talking about which is not really the case the big box stores but you sacrifice service for a great price and right now you can actually beat the prices a little bit at a lumber yard because they've bought it more recently for a lower price that's not across the board i'm just telling you locally i see that some so these are all temporary conditions but they're current conditions so i'll get into exactly what that means based on if you guys remember my little um my first video i had like a 4x8 wall with zip board and i had a 4x8 wall of real icf and i just compared the price of four foot by eight foot and um if you if you go back to that first video the price of lumber uh the prices of the sheets of zip board was 55 dollars a sheet and i'll i'll kind of put this back up here to remind everybody that was for 7 16 zip that was for you know the green zip which is 7 16. the orange is either half inch or 5 8 but the green zip was fifty five dollars a sheet two by six by eight which you'd have five of them for a four foot wall if you put it made you know top and bottom plate out of the same thing just very rudimentary uh figures was 12 33 per and the tape was 32 dollars for a roll of tape and my normal multiplier on tape on zip tape is you're gonna need about six rolls or six sheets per roll you can get about eight sheets taped but then you gotta go back and tape windows and door openings and stuff so you'll it'll end up being about you know if you had you know 300 sheets you're going to need you know 50 sheets of zip tape and that's just kind of a good rule of thumb so to figure all that out and the insulation at the time was about a dollar sixty-five a square foot came to 187 dollars for that four by eight wall section which was insane to me because that was probably a hundred dollars six months prior but it was just it's insane it is what it is but that's where we were so then the futures of lumber fell down to around 1400 and i revisited the video the last week of may and i was hoping you know the futures had come down about 300 points we were gonna be in better shape and this stuff had even gone up more it was ridiculous you remember i couldn't hardly even say it i was so shocked it was at 71 dollars a sheet which guys i've been buying this stuff for years for under 20. 17 bucks a sheet a year and a half ago i think is what i paid for a whole bunch of it on the big house um you know even the mid-20s was acceptable this is just i haven't bought any osb we're doing everything with concrete at the moment we're doing light deck roofs right now because it's cheaper on flat roofs on modern homes um two by sixes were up to 15 apiece which is gross and the tape was crazily enough up to 42 dollars a roll and i left the insulation alone because i hadn't actually talked to my insulation guy and he hadn't thrown any shots across my bow or any warnings to tell me that i needed to worry but i probably should have called him because the resin shortage has really kicked their butts in the spray foam a lot of guys are having trouble getting product the resins um and the guys that are paying a lot more for it so the price is up on that but at that point we were at 211 dollars for that 4x8 sheet and it will get into the icf but it had been like 195 dollars in the first video so it was just a tad more and it had gone i raised the price like 10 because i thought that's what was coming down the pipe on fox blocks so i raised it preemptively because nothing had changed when i did that video but i knew it was coming and i wanted to be fair to lumber with knowing that icf was going up so it was sitting right at 200 so all of a sudden icf was literally cheaper product to product again you're going to remember you guys are going to remember you guys hammered me for leaving out rebar on the icf and i'm going to go i'm going to revisit why i did that because rebar is almost the same whether you're in california in a seismic zone down in dolphin island alabama where we built these beach houses i'll link them so you kind of see what i'm talking about when i reference the price of strapping um [Music] it's always about the same on rebar you know seismic zone will have a few extra big pieces of rebar for lentils and stuff in a wind zone if you're really trying to get to that 250 mile an hour wind rating you're gonna have more verticals it's gonna be about two thousand bucks on a two thousand square foot house for rebar strapping for that same house if you do it all stick frame depending on your human your municipality is going to go anywhere from in springfield missouri which we have fairly reasonable codes on you know wind and everything you know probably a thousand bucks for simpson strapping you're talking hurricane ties um clip uh the the vertical straps like your lst straps that go you know connect your studs to your floor all that stuff that's required by code maybe a thousand dollars in springfield missouri those those houses in uh dolphin island now they're bigger they're about four thousand feet but five years ago the strapping was six grand per house it's about 7 500 now so you you know point is i'm trying to keep this as apples to apples as i can and depending on where you're watching this video strapping and nails can be significantly more than the rebar or somewhat less than rebar so i'm leaving it i'm leaving all that out i'm also not factoring in nails and strapping to my wall so just understand that i'm not the video would be an hour long guys if i tried to get into every nut and bolt i'm trying to give you guys broad strokes to where if you see the point of what i'm saying you will look into it in your own market because what i'm saying is fairly close to reality in most markets so anyway um today i went back over to home depot to check everything zip board again it's a wafer product it's got a lot of resin in it and they're not moving 68 bucks a sheet guys that's insane it's stupid i love zip i will not be buying it for 68 dollars a sheet i can avoid it for at least a few two or three more months before i have to bite a bullet and i'm gonna wait as long as i can two by sixes though dimensional lumber which is actually what this futures price actually references they're down to 10 bucks this piece which is down from 15. that's pretty awesome granted that's still quite a bit more than we were paying a year ago um but that change is good that's at least a um indicator but installation is up and a minimum i got a guy who pre-bought a bunch of product and he's still having to charge a buck 85 and i'm not even sure he's making money at that so that's up you know 15 and most guys if they've managed to procure product may have paid more than that and they may be up over two bucks but i'm going to give you my guys price because that's what i just paid the other day for a house um the wall cost so that 4x8 is now at 188.50 which is only a dollar more than the march price and almost 20 dollars less more than 20 less than the may price for that wall so it's coming down but it's still very similar to icf and not remotely similar in quality so you know if this was back down to 100 bucks you could absolutely make the case that hey i'm not going to live there long enough to amortize out the value added in icf whatever i always think you can because of these savings and utilities and insurance and stuff but right now so you're at 188. to be fair to icf let me grab my little fun blocks here so we got icf icf blocks and i the last video was at 425 per square foot and that was a guess i think with realities of the demand because i'm not the only one doing this math guys i mean we have tons of builders that have switched to just do their crawl space walls with icf because their carpenters can do it instead of a wall guy that's four months out and charging a mint for walls i mean more power to the wall guys it's a hard job but they are getting paid right now and all of a sudden their carpenters can do these and it's well worth their time now you have an insulated crawl space whatever it's a better crawl yada yada and we have a lot of people doing that a lot of people just go hey i'm building a house we saw this guy's videos this makes sense to us and school buildings all kinds of different things are going icf the demand is so high they're really straining the production capacity right now so our lead times went from one week to five weeks six weeks seven weeks on some of these products and the price is up a little bit they're trying their best to keep it low because again i'm not the only one that thinks that at least half of the houses in the country ought to be icf um you know i think the icf companies would like to see that too but they're not maybe ready to make that many blocks so i'm gonna factor in i'm gonna go up from 425 i think in reality after freight because like fox blocks we used to buy them right out of nixon they still make them there but they're so demanded out of that plant i'm having to still get my stuff out of omaha the home office right now which is fine but the freight's a little bit more so i'm gonna factor in about 440 to 450 today to be fair because i think most of you i mean i know a lot of people have have a hard time getting these locally they're having to buy them through a lumber yard lumber yard may mark them up higher so while they could be gettable at a lower price i'm going to factor in like 450 today so that 4x8 piece of icf that we're going to compare to that 188 dollars for a wood frame today it was 200 even in may we're gonna go to 212 right now concrete has been completely stable you guys may get hit with a fuel charge it's only fair those trucks get like five miles to the gallon and diesel is ridiculous you know my plant is still basically exactly stable they pre-bought all their portland for the year before the beginning of the year so they have not gotten hit with anything gross but the lead times are four to eight weeks so if you're really thinking about this guys you got to order early now um at least and that's that's a not a permanent thing i've been told by the guys at fox and i mean i'm hearing that from others they're just really adjusting to a new demand i mean fox blocks is up 180 percent this year and it's wonderful uh it'd be it'd be wonderful to see that continue and see a lot of people in you know down in the southwest where it's really hot and up north where it's really cold getting these icf walls because it's just so much better for everything long term in my opinion but it's now back to being more than lumber you know in may when i made the case that it's actually cheaper it shouldn't be it's a far superior far more structurally sound uh more durable for the long haul a lot of people random people that don't really understand environmental stuff but want a virtue signal and stuff will talk about oh they quit making coffee cups out of that stuff because it was so bad for the landfills right it's not going in a landfill you know a single-use plastic is terrible i hate them i don't like water bottles i don't like any of that stuff because single-use plastic is wasteful this stuff is used and it'll be on that house for a couple hundred years longer you know i mean that's the whole point this stuff doesn't biodegrade it provides an insulation it's providing a function that otherwise would be formaldehyde and fiberglass or gross like you know resinous foams that are all worse for you and the environment than this which is completely inert and then portland you say portland is so bad when they make it it's really hard on the environment because of those big ovens and the amount of energy that it takes to make it but once it's made it lasts forever lumber it's a pretty green industry actually the way that they manage timber and everything else it's not like people like oh they're cutting all these trees but they plant more trees and they cut down and they manage it it's their business but lumber only lasts so long i mean i've been to china and seen thousand-year-old wood buildings it's amazing but they're also timbers that are you know the size of vw cars i mean these two by fours don't last forever guys um so there's value added if you actually factor in over the long haul this is a much greener system anyway that's just an aside because i i do like reading a lot of your comments but i don't think you guys 100 understand the point i'm making at times when you got to figure life of a wood structure is 50 to 100 years this is off the charts i mean it just go i mean you know you've got roman structures that use concrete that's 2 000 years old and it wasn't nearly the quality of concrete we use today the science that goes into concrete and i'm gonna actually do a tour of my favorite concrete plant just to kind of show you how technologically advanced concrete production is today but anyway um really so right now the market is you know it's going down on lumber i think icf is done going up and i think the lead times are done getting bad i i've been told that by the beginning of the year we'll be back down to normal lead times we've bought as many of our swimming pools and projects as we can right now um and just trying to give you some ideas on what's coming uh for on this channel i've got a bunch more pool stuff at least while it's hot outside we got pools you know for the rest of the year then i'll be showing you our eco finish guys are scheduling us for the first and the end of the first week of august it's just like a week out where the trainers are coming we're gonna do three pools that are ready and semi-patiently for the eco finish and i'm that that product is really going to just open up the world of icf pools and just they're very competitive with gunnite for a million reasons and they're better from an insulated value from heating they're just so much easier to heat so we're going to be bringing you a lot more pool content but also one of the pools we're building is at a house that i built a couple years ago and he's got a very cool aston martin and we are building a detached garage basically because he's got he only has a three-car garage on the house and he's got a side-by-side and the wife's car so he's kind of getting crowded we're gonna build him a super cool all icf two-car detached garage with a light deck roof it is a bunker we're going to heat it with hydronic heat it's just it's going to be very amenity-led it's going to have a lift and i'm going to bring that whole build to you guys um we're just waiting on getting he has a double lot we have to get a property line erased real quick which takes like 30 days so that's coming i'm building a 50 by 100 16 foot tall wall icf um barn effectively um which is gonna be super cool we're gonna pour those 16 foot walls in one shot and just like said a lot more man it is thundering i hope you guys can't hear that too much on the on the microphone but uh and in addition to those videos we got two really cool home tour videos coming uh one of them is all icf and light deck like it is a masterpiece i didn't build it i did build their pool but the house was already under construction when i met them but it is one of the most amazing icf and light deck projects in the country and i'm getting ready to bring that one to you i'm also going to bring you one from that house at the with that garage that's super cool it's got a lot of icf which is ultra modern really really cool house and i'm getting ready to bring you guys a video where we recreate the astm small and large missile test which sounds really cool but it's basically shooting two by fours at walls to check impact ratings they do it to windows they do it to doors they do it to wall systems we're gonna build our little osb wall again we're gonna build an icf wall and actually fill it up with concrete and just for the three little pigs theme we'll probably do a straw bale wall like these crazy people building houses out of strawbells that's that's one i don't understand 100 but we're gonna shoot two by fours through a cannon i'm building and the the the government test is only like 40 miles an hour i think we can do a little better we can hillbilly that up a little bit and get get the velocity up a little to have a little more fun and we'll we'll have that fun video just kind of comparing because that's the funny thing is i talked about cost and value and everything else of icf but i've never really brought you the thing that icf shines at the most it can take a direct shot from an f5 tornado and you may lose your roof or whatever but those walls will remain and they will protect you their storm their storm and disaster um resistance is uncomparable to any other building system out there other than just commercial concrete walls which don't give you any of the insulated values so anyway that's what's coming in the very very near future but i just kind of wanted to bring you a quick snapshot today of the lumber i mean it's on its way down guys but at this point the little bit of price difference you go that's 20 that's you know 10 percent different that's just on your outside wall you amortize out or you spread out the cost of the rest of the house which is basically equal icf to stick frame maybe you're two percent maybe less than two percent different right now and that's not a difference icf is going to save you so much money so fast on utility savings peace of mind i mean that's not really a dollar amount but it matters um since thundering right now they're talking about you know possible tornadoes and stuff tonight and i don't have my icf room built i'm gonna be laying in a stick frame house just wondering you know if if the tornado sirens are gonna start going off so that that that that factors in too guys but ultimately i mean lumber's a lumber's a great product i'm not knocking it i'm just pointing out that right now in this crazy market in this crazy world icf is still the decision that i would make if i was building my own brand new house make your builder look into it um there's a lot of guys out there that have kind of made the switch already this year lots more will you know and the faster you guys start asking for it the faster everybody will realize how good it is so i will catch you guys next time probably next week i think tomorrow is not gonna be raining i think we're gonna get out there and finish that light deck and i'm gonna bring you that video real quick because it's such a cool product and while everybody knows what icf is a lot of guys are missing the boat on on light deck because right now you can almost do a light deck floor for the same money as advantek and i joist and at that point they're not comparable so that stuff will span 40 feet with no support walls under it and have no bounce it'll be completely you know rigid so i'm gonna bring you that next week um stay tuned but if any of those other videos sound cool don't for don't forget to click subscribe and ring that little bell so it'll notify you when i post a video i usually try to hit them on sunday mornings my computer's mediocre so i've been late a couple times on uploading but we're getting that fixed next weekend so i will see you guys next time

Channel: Cutting Edge Homes !

Views: 12,690

Rating: 4.9096775 out of 5

Keywords: 春田, 斯普林菲尔德, 密苏里, 投资, 买房, springfield mo, builder, icf, icf construction, icf homes, icf pools, icf price, lumber futures, lumber costs, modern homes, insulated concrete forms, cutting edge homes, cutting edge pools, icf building, lite deck

Id: UDWjlGw8DNo

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021