According to the National Association of Home Builders and the Associated General Contractors of America, the price of building materials of all kinds is about to go up all over the United States. It will be especially noticeable next spring when repairing the damage done to the Gulf States by hurricane Katrina and her sister Rita is in full swing.
This will undoubtedly be felt in the Wood River Valley, where, despite some limited building moratoriums, there is an abundantly evident building boom and where most building materials are already about 30 percent higher than they were in 2003, according to Garth Callahan, a longtime Wood River Valley general contractor. Callahan expects those prices to continue to rise. As an example, he pointed out that the cost of steel reinforcing bars, or rebar, used to strengthen any concrete structure (including building foundations), doubled in just a 45-day period last summer. The cost of plywood has more than doubled in recent months.
Callahan, who sits on the board of Citizens for Smart Growth and who built the first certified "Developing Green" home in the Wood River Valley, just north of Hailey on Big Dipper Lane off Buttercup Road, foresees that allocations of building materials may come to the Wood River Valley.
"I haven't seen any problem yet," he said, "but it may happen." Developing Green developed the "Built Green WRV" rating system as a check list for builders, developers, architects and homeowners interested in designing healthy, efficient and environmentally sustainable homes. Green building might be viewed as a big-picture method of coping with the rising cost of building materials.
According to Callahan, "This is where home construction is heading. It just makes sense. You get a better product, it's healthier to live in, the monthly utility bill is much less and it has less impact on the environment. Most of the green features don't cost any more, and the others pay for themselves over time. It's a win-win situation."
Chris Gammon, of Hailey, who owns and operates IGL Recycled Timbers in Carey, deals in recycled lumber that has been salvaged from old buildings, bridges, barns, boat docks, industrial warehouses and other structures that have been torn down.
"Recycled lumber is not less expensive for the consumer," Gammon said. "Sometimes it is double the price, but the payoff is that we're not cutting down trees."
Despite the higher initial cost of recycled wood, Gammon believes it is a better product. In addition to the fact that old-growth forests are not logged and therefore old-growth lumber is not readily available, he points out the three advantages to recycled wood:
· The look of old timber is aesthetically more pleasing.
· Old timber is dry and will neither warp nor crack as green timber is prone to.
· In the big picture, it is the environmentally right thing to do.
He aligns his company with the motto of the Duluth Timber Co. of Duluth, Minn., a national distributor of recycled wood: "Logging the industrial forest."
Greg Carter, general manager for the Hailey and Ketchum offices of Silver Creek Supply, a wholesale distributor for plumbing, irrigation fixtures and piping with 12 stores in Idaho and Wyoming, also foresees that building materials will rise in cost.
"It's all tied to the price of oil and gasoline and the cost of transporting," he said. Carter also noted that any building product that is made from petrochemicals is going to cost more to manufacture even before it's loaded onto a more-expensive-to-operate truck, train, plane or ship for transportation.
Petrochemicals are made from crude oil and natural gas, using about 5 percent of what is consumed to make all petrochemical products. Events like the war in Iraq and the hurricanes in the Gulf have contributed to a dramatic rise in the price of oil. Among the petrochemical building products commonly used are vinyl acetate for paint, paper and textile coatings, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used to make the lightweight and durable plastic pipe. The United States consumes far more oil and oil-based products than any other country, four times more than China and one-fourth more than the entire European Union combined.
A major contributor to the rising prices of building materials, including lumber and concrete, is a nationwide building boom that is as evident in the Wood River Valley as anywhere. According to Jon Anderson of Oregon, an analyst for the lumber industry and publisher of a market report called "Random Lengths," the wood products industry can't keep up with the needs of the housing market.
"The root cause is just incredibly high demand, mostly coming from the new housing sector," said Anderson. "This has stressed the ability of the industry to supply that demand. And the result is upward pressure on prices. And in some cases, it's fairly dramatic upward pressure."
A high demand and a decreasing supply inevitably leads to a higher price. According to Carter, the present situation makes it difficult if not impossible for contractors to guarantee the building process will proceed according to plan and time table. However, the optimistic Carter advises, "Keep your chin up. It's going to get better."
At least one Ketchum contractor, Ken Corrock, is not waiting, but, rather, is making it better in the present moment, coping with the rising cost of building materials by recycling old ones into new projects. Corrock, who has lived and worked in Ketchum for more than 30 years, makes it a practice to recycle lumber as much as possible. He has done this on many remodel projects he has worked on over the years. Right now he is in the middle of a remodel of his own home on Short Swing Lane in Ketchum. It is a duplex and he is remodeling the other half as well. Each half of the duplex was 1,100 square feet in size before he began adding another level. By the time Corrock is finished, each side will have some 800 square feet of additional living space on an upper level.
He began the project on July 1 and spent a month and a half tearing it down. Each piece of lumber and each shake had to be painstakingly removed by hand. "It's labor intensive," Corrock said, "but shakes usually last 25 to 30 years and these are only 10 years old. Even with the labor, I saved half the cost of new shakes. And, besides, it's the right thing to do. The environment appreciates it."
At many remodel construction sites there is usually one or sometimes more huge dumpsters filled with the debris from the original structure—sheets of plywood, various lengths of 2-by-4, 2-by-6, 2-by-10 and other lumber, shakes, beams, insulation and other building materials—destined for the dump. At Corrock's site there is a small dumpster containing a small amount of unusable material from his house.
Almost every piece of lumber, every piece of insulation, each wood shake on the roof and exterior side of the house is being reused. The 2-by-10 rafters from the old roof now support the new floor, which is covered with reused plywood.
Corrock also said he tries to steer clients toward using certain synthetic building materials. He showed a deck on the side of his house made of TREX, a material made of recycled plastic garbage and grocery bags and ground-up wood chips. "It lasts forever," Corrock said, and is great for any surface that will see a lot of wear.
Corrock estimates that recycling on this project has saved him between $6,000 and $7,000 in the cost of building materials.
That's a good start in coping with rising costs.
Ketchum contractor Ken Corrock makes it a practice to recycle lumber as much as possible.
