It makes me wonder .. if the US shutdown Canadian wood imports, would that significantly lower prices for Canadian consumers? How low would it go?
I once asked a recent undergrad in Economics graduate, at a party, why one pound of bread costs more than one pound of meat (the inputs and processing costs are vastly different, through the life of the animal, the meat should be way, way more) but, blank stare, more beer.
I for one believe that most of the markets, most of the time, make no sense at all from the perspective of the real natural inputs, and all the sense in the world from the point of view of one human group selling things to another human group, any way they can; old timber included.
If you look at pure flour, rice, beans, pasta, and stuff like that, there are lots of cases where it drops from prepared-foods price down to something closer to its commodity value. Looking up rice, it goes for $14/c.w.t., which I think translates to a little over $0.10 per pound. You can't buy it at that price, but you can buy a literal 1 lb bag of the bad rice for $1.00. Consider larger quantities and you'll probably see an asymptote to a reasonable multiple times the commodity value.
Meat will not follow those rules. The floor for meat is much higher due to the physical inefficiency of production. Even at that higher price floor, there are huge untaxed externalities. A lot of people know the reality that we have to eat a lot less meat due to halt climate change. I think there is a strong business and social culture for businesses to move meat at close to its price floor, with business models like fast food.
Either way, no offense, but your economics grad needs to re-take some basic classes. To simplify, input costs only establish a floor on prices. Otherwise, prices are set by dynamic market supply/demand curves.
It probably wouldnt go low because you are not recognising global demand and a growing global population, cost of automation for factory (automated built) furniture, bespoke furniture by individual or small teams of carpenters, cost of transporting wood to other countries where costs are different.
Here in the UK we have this place https://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ it does real solid (oak) wood furniture, not some furniture made of chipboard.
It seems quite cheap but there are visible cost savings, like the furniture isnt that big, its suited to smaller homes than some grand mansion or luxury home, and with a lot of businesses, where finance/credit is available, sometimes the company main business is actually a credit broker/finance specialising in a niche market product.
Some people have said GE (General Electric) is now more a financial entity than a manufacturer, this is business diversification over the decades.
To be fair, pretty much anything built after 1960 is small, and all UK housing is small by American standards.
I also don't think most people in the UK consider OakFurnitureLand a cheap, or even an affordable place to buy furniture. Despite being made of cheap internationally sourced oak, and somewhat mediocre, it's definitely a premium brand. If you were to buy all your furniture there many people would consider you well off.
Spot on with the reality of their finance business though
Even the carcasses use solid wood. Some of the returned furniture had cracks in interior wooden boards where a composite like ply/chip/MDF would not have cracked. I guess solid wood is lighter, part of their brand and they have less diversity of material sourcing. It must pay off, even with slightly higher returns.
That's how most houses are built in central Europe for example: https://budujemydom.pl/i/2020/01/02/215608-d885-1100x0-sc1x5...
Of course later the insulation is added: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pressland-cms/cache/__...
In the north masonry homes have a lot of problems with freeze thaw cycles. As far as upgrades , remodeling, overall costs goes stick built homes are superior.
That's weird, central Europe has pretty northern climate with cold snowy winters and hot summers and I've never heard about any such problems. I've lived my whole life in such houses. You just need proper insulation (but you need it anyway cause heating is expansive). I think Americans don't much care for good windows for example, at least in the movies they have these weird 1-layer sliding windows that nobody would use here :).
> As far as upgrades , remodeling, overall costs goes stick built homes are superior.
There's a bit of stigma against wooden houses here and they are considered worse investment because they degrade and lose value much faster.
Protectionism isn't always a good idea. Doing so would've made the final lumber output more expensive for Canadian consumers.
Automation is coming for the good-paying jobs sooner or later, anyways. The solution wasn't/isn't to ban outsourcing/automation, it's to better distribute the gains from outsourcing/automation across society.
Now if only the lumber were properly dried instead of shipped slopping wet. (Actually, I suspect the kiln-dried lumber is destined for wealthy foreign markets; we locals get the c-grade crap. I have spent literally more than an hour picking through stacks to find enough good lumber to build a shed.)
A covered pile outdoors or in a warehouse will yield straighter lumber (or just don't crank the kiln to 11) but that is not economically viable for random pine that people frame things with.
But you can't enter the market and compete with me, because you don't have the right grandfather.
Just saying that the free tree isn’t free
https://taskandpurpose.com/mandatory-fun/constitution-grove-...
Could that have been lumber from old growth forests that are now either extinct or protected from logging?
IIRC, lumber nowadays is basically farmed using relatively fast-growing trees.
Trees on plantation are straighter than wild trees.
To get that beautiful wood again, we would have to plant the forests, let them grow for hundreds of years, then harvest the wood. Well, that's not going to happen, so we end up in the situation we are in of having to use a very poor substitute.
Translation: it's made from the smallest possible tree you could plausibly saw a 4x4 out of. And the pith (the center of the trunk) running through the middle guarantees that the post will split along the radial plane as it dries.
If you go to a better lumber yard, you get better lumber. Except, apparently, for 2x3's. They are universally crap. Source: built a chicken coop with 2x3's and bought from a local outfit because they deliver inexpensively. Everything else was gorgeous compared to the box home improvement store. The 2x3's were pretty much the same.
Makes sense that the larger cross-sectional lumber needs to come from a larger cross-sectional tree with few defects. The crap-wood they can turn into 2x4, 2x3....
Wood can have a fair amount of internal stress in it, and cutting it can release it in ways that cause your boards to warp, twist, or bend.
(Freely available to download for anybody who's curious)
https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar...
https://miro.medium.com/max/2976/1*zUezbWclc1bubBJOS0qiew.jp...
Old growth trees aren’t exactly growing back on a timeline that matters to you and me.
^ this is pure speculation
Trees grown among other trees have to grow up to reach sunlight. The innermost part of the lower trunk might have knots from branches when the tree was young, but once they reach harvestable size, there's a fair amount of clear lumber down low.
Trees grown in the open don't have the pressure to grow upwards, and end up with branches down low throughout their lives (from the center all the way through to the bark). As a result, there's very little clear lumber in them.
Disclaimer, I'm a furnituremaker, not a forester. The above is somewhat better than pure speculation, but likely misses some important bits.
For hardwoods, it's typically the heartwood that's more desirable. Walnut and cherry both have pretty strongly contrasting sapwood that does not match the customer's expectation for the color of those woods, for instance.
The wood used to built those houses was the old growth timber of the western united states. Its basically gone now. As well as the second, third and fourth growth.
Wood of sufficient quality to do the things we used to do with it simply doesn't come from industrial forests.
Right after seeing that movie I visited an old house where everything is wood. Huge wood cabinets, wood floors, wood ceiling, etc...
I suddenly realised that I can't afford wood furniture any more! The IKEA stuff I buy these days is made of "manufactured" materials that are "wood-like", but have essentially cardboard honeycomb between two sheets of plywood or something.
I used to have IKEA furniture that was solid pine, but good luck finding anything like that in their store these days...
IKEA do have some solid pine (furu). Here is one https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/rast-kommode-med-3-skuffer-furu...
It didn't take long to find it in their catalogue.
Anyway, IKEA is not the only company selling furniture.
You are correct that most solid woods are expensive (not pine usually though) but that is at least in part simply due to high demand for such furniture and the lack of supply of the raw materials.
1. https://energynews.us/2019/12/02/estonia-is-beginning-to-see...
That stuff was, evidently, so cheap from the perspective of people in the 1910s, that they didn't think it worth any amount of effort to sub in worse wood for places where looks didn't matter. These days, some of that would be hard to find at any price, short of salvaging it from old buildings like that. And that's the "crap" they put under the nice wood they used for finishing!
OTOH we do have drywall, which has got to be cheaper in pretty much every way than lathe-and-plaster.