Good morning, everyone. And welcome to Stay Modern with Murray. A new podcast brought to you by our team here at Murray Custom Homes. Today, we are actually here with Chris Routhe, from Millard lumber, talking about all things, lumber pricing. So welcome, Chris. I appreciate you coming. Thanks, Matt. I'm happy to be here.
Awesome. Well, obviously, Chris, you and I know, um, lumber pricing is creeping back up right now, uh, to middle of 2021 pricing. And first off, I just want to kind of do a 10,000 foot view. Uh, a walkthrough for those listeners that don't know what happened in the middle of 2021, and don't know what's happening right now.
So just kind of give us a, take a, you know, a pre 20, 21 pre pre COVID lumber pricing and, and what we're dealing with. Yeah. So I'd probably go back to 2020 rent when COVID happened. Um, if you think about the economy and what people are thinking with, with all the COVID shutdowns, the lockdowns, you know, who would have thought the economy would have taken off, right?
People were predicting the opposite to happen. Who's going to build a or buy a house during COVID. That doesn't make sense. You don't know if you're going to have a job or not. So if you think about from productions and suppliers and manufacturers, they all predict. The economy to collapse. So they cut production down.
They pulled back, they didn't have workers working. They were stuck at home. So there was a supply, a pullback basically. Well, the reverse happened. If you think about it in may of 2020, people were remodeling their houses, building fences, putting pools in their backyards, adding additions to their houses and people were moving.
People were moving out of the cities and they wanted more land. They wanted a backyard. So about June of 2020, we started seeing prices skyrocket, and we thought this would be short-lived and eventually we would move on, but it didn't quite happen. Or we had some pullbacks towards the end of 2020, but then shortly after the spring build cycle started a year ago and lumber prices just skyrocketed, I think may was our highest prices we've ever seen in all history.
You know, I've been working in the lumber industry for about 20 years. We've never seen anything like this. This is unprecedented and yeah, about June of last year, lumber prices started to come down. Basically supplies got caught up housing slowed a little bit, but overall demand is just skyrocketing and going crazy.
Um, so we're seeing that again, we're seeing a resurgence lack of supply housing demand is off the charts. I mean, I'm sure you're getting calls all the time to build new houses. And if you look at, I don't know if you talk to realtors, I assume you do. 60 houses on the market and Lincoln. Yep. I believe so.
In Omaha, there's like 140 and a half of them are under contract right now. So there's not enough houses yet. And we'll provide some context that a little bit later on it's it's crazy. So, yeah, uh, basically shortages of supply, the number one issues right now is trucking and getting, uh, Lumber from the reloads to the local lumberyards, like my, like myself, uh, it's not going so well.
There's not many truckers out there and they're competing over, you know, higher bids for different, uh, deliveries and all that. So. It's a struggle of, you know, what's going on right now. But this winter, we saw a lot of lumber prices going up shortly before Thanksgiving, there was major flooding in Canada and nobody thought much about it.
It wasn't making headline news, but I was paying attention to it. Yup. It wiped out rails. It riped out interstates and we didn't start seeing prices start going up until about mid December of this last year. And it's gone up ever since. And it's winter typically here in Nebraska, not much building happens in the middle of winter, but the last three months we've seen record sales, basically not based on dollars because of higher lumber prices.
Number of sticks, we've shipped out. We shipped up more sticks in February, January. Than any other month in 2021. Well, that's crazy. We've never done that. Typically we plan for a slow winter season and it didn't happen. So if you think about that on a global or a bigger scale, yup. We've had all this housing construction going on nationwide and there's been a lack of supply and getting, you know, just basic logistics and stuff, moving around the country again.
And it's just, and right now we're beginning. So typically the end of February is the buying season for the spring. So if it's high already, imagine where it's going. Yeah. So provide a little context. I admittedly did not necessarily religiously follow the futures index for lumber. When we came into COVID was probably the first time they started religiously following.
Explain. If you can draw a connection, I'm a math guy. If you can draw a connection between the futures index, and let's just say a place of, uh, a piece of four by 8, 7 16 OSB. Cause I think that's what most homeowners can recognize as they walk into Home Depot Lowe's they see a four way sheet of, of OSB and they might need some for a home project.
They noticed that I would say pre pandemic. 1415 bucks a sheet safely at a big box store. It may be even cheaper. Yeah, that sounds about right. And, and I would have to say, would you say at the futures index is maybe around four or 500 pre pandemic? Uh, I would say that was probably a little bit higher than it was pre pandemics, right.
When the COVID hit and the shutdowns happened, construction did slow down for about a month and a half and it reached the bottom of like 2 25 or so on the index. Uh, but in the last, you know, three, four years prior to COVID, we were hovering. 300 to four 50 range in a three-year period. We've, we've galloped past that.
And what single month in lens since COVID happened, but, okay. So the thing four by eight plywood, you see it in your garage, just leaning against the wall. You know, like you said, it was 14, 15 bucks at the box store. Now it's what, 48 bucks, something like that. And so the futures lumber index, isn't exactly it.
The index is tied to two by four SPF lumber. So plywood and lumber, they correlate to a degree. They go up and down at different times, but it's not one for one. Um, so I, I know you just started paying attention to it once COVID happened. Paying attention to that. Cause that's our job as a lumberyard. Yeah.
We kind of want to guess and try and make the best buy as possible to be the most competitive on a daily basis. But so before COVID what we called it is living in the flatland. You know, like I said, in that three-year period, it might've gone up a hundred bucks in a three-year period. Uh, so now we're living in the wildlife now up and down roller coasters.
And so the futures lumber index, isn't the exact price that we're paying today for lumber. It's the market. It's lumberyards, it's commercial buyers that are trying to say, okay, in March, I think the price is going to be here in may. It's going to be here July. It fluctuates quite a bit, but it's kind of a financial guessing game.
Um, and it's basically kind of to bring liquidity in the market. So the mills are producing lumber on a daily basis. And they're trying to ship that now at the best price, or if we think, well, I can produce stuff in January, but no one needs wood in January. But they do in may. They want to try and sell a contract in may and try and get the best price.
Then for the mills perspective may not be the best, lowest price for a homeowner, but they're trying to smooth out the forecasting basically. Yep. I think what got a little bit confusing for us and what I want to try to maybe illustrate to our listeners and maybe potential Murray clients. Is how difficult it's been to navigate these turbulent waters as I've kind of went through this, I've noticed that Steve Schmidt at Millard lumber obviously is our rep and even how confused he was with how it all worked.
And, and, and I think what a lot of you were thought, um, well, All's we need to do is put out an email or a phone call and get what the price is going to be when they built their house. When we went and be framing their house in three or four months. Right. Um, and that's just not possible. It's, it's, it's almost like predicting the future.
Um, but then what w w got brought into that was we keep talking about the futures market. Well, the futures market, you know, that's three or four months out. So if you can buy the lumber today, Then you should actually know what you're getting in three or four months, if that makes sense. So there was a lot of confusion as we wrote the price up with the futures market, the price went up with lumber on the, on the floor, right.
But as the futures index went down, our price didn't necessarily move down at the same speed of the futures index. So there was a lot of confusion all around, and I started to understand why customers are confused because we're confused. You know, Steve is confused. It's just a very unique time for all of us.
Yeah, and very much so. I mean, what we've lived in the last two and a half years now is something that we've never had to really deal with. You know, if we give you a price on a house, you're gonna start framing in three to four months from now, it might change a little bit, but it's not gonna break the bank change.
Um, one thing we've seen, you know, with rollercoaster ride up and down and you're watching the futures index on a more regular basis and you ever have. And you see that it skyrockets pretty quick and it plummeted really quick last summer. And we've got that question a lot. Like, well, why does my price come down?
What, you know, I seen it go up and you were quick to go up and fat, uh, slow to go down this pretty much since this last summer. And ended December has been interesting because we saw that precipitous increase March, April, may of last year. And then it plummeted in June and people were asking us, well, why, why, why, why?
You know, why is my price coming down as fast? We've seen this where now that people are watching futures are see that while the index is going up, that means my lumber price is going to be higher next month. So especially like in December of this last year, right after the things before the Thanksgiving, floods in Canada, uh, people saw their prices going up.
They may be got like a mid month price increase and they're like, well, crap, January is gonna be higher. Shipped the lumber. I don't need to build the house today. I mean, I've heard it like there's many lumberyards all over Lincoln, the past couple of months. So that's part of the thing. So if we ship out lumber at a faster rate in those months, will that depletes our inventory.
So we're having to rebuy. And so last summer in June, when the future started plummeting, everyone waited a month. It's like, well, tell me homeowner, if we, if we wait 30 more days, that might save you eight to 10 grand on your framing bill. So when we've got, you know, all of our builders that we work with in Lincoln and Omaha that are doing that intensive.
Our cost doesn't come out in our yard. So it's yeah. So it's slower to go down when people wait, you're still sitting on the same price of lumber, right? Yup. And on the way up. So typically we have seasonality built into how much we buy lumber. We have contracts every single week that we have trucks guaranteed to come in and based on historical records, like I said, winter months, you're not building as many, so we don't need as much.
Summer months you do. So our contracts, we were getting less trucks in the winter. And like I said, we built more houses in the last two, three months than ever before. So we were running out of inventory. I mean, we got the calls four by eight plywood. You guys are out. How can a lumberyard be out because we ship more than we planned on shipping.
Yep. And yeah, it's been a cascading effect and every day is a new day LVL beams. Very tough. There was a fire at a mill few months back. We're not getting our trucks where, you know, there's a chance we could run out. And three weeks from now. And one topic that I don't want to forget to ask that I don't have on the agenda.
Don't let me forget to ask you is if you feel this Russia, Ukraine, uh, conflict is going to affect us at all. I hope not, but before I get off of the topic that we're currently talking about, She had some light. When you, when you say that you're shipping more than you ever have shipped before I get that a lot amongst friends and acquaintances is, uh, just filled it a call from my old high school wrestling coach this morning of saying, holy cow, you guys must be doing so well.
You guys are killing it. You're, you know, your industry is just killing it. And you know, I, it takes me about one. Uh, for them to hear the tone in my voice of, of how difficult it's been. And I heard the same from a farmer a couple of years ago of saying, you know, when, when corn goes up to five or six bucks, we don't make any more money.
You just have more input costs. Right. And I'll be completely honest. I think our entire office is, felt the strain, the pressure, um, you know, the problem with us is we don't w you know, we do fixed price contract. And so you're, you're pricing a house in March and you don't finish it until December or January.
So any of those price increase. Come directly out of your pocket, right? And so the time energy and efforts spent having to navigate these turbulent waters and supplies, not showing up and subcontractors rather than doing one trip, they're doing five trips and having to hire a purchasing department, just because of the fluctuation of pricing, of everything, of shortages of delays.
It has not been fun. I know it hasn't been fun for us. We're not getting rich. We're we're trying to do the best we can and navigate these unusual times to keep our heads above water and stay ahead of the pricing. Um, shed a little bit of light. What, where are you guys at? What I am assuming you're probably in the same boat of, of, of not being ready to retire and getting rich off of this.
No, at other people's expense. Right. And yeah. And you said it, I mean, yeah, like I said, gangbuster last few months, just because we shipped more sticks of lumber. Um, there was a cost to that. And, you know, we were having to buy, like I said, with our seasonality in our contracts are guaranteed contracted price of lumber.
We were having to pay on the wholesale. We were having to call a distribution points all around Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas city. And we had to pay overprice, but we still had to remain competitive in the market. So we were having to buy OSB plywood at a way higher cost than what we would typically buy.
Yeah, but we can't just automatically raise our price. We still have to remain competitive. So yeah, the supply chain down a major issue, but, and I don't know about you, but January was there, uh, with that Omicron COVID surge. Yep. We have about 300 employees and about 15% of them were out sick with cold flu COVID whatever.
So even though operationally, we're trying to get more stuff out the door. Cause that's what people are demanding of us. You know, get my stuff out there. We want to build the weather's beautiful. We had less staff and it was just crazy. We were trying to bring in temp workers at crazy high rates and, and you know what, this inflation that's going on, you know, we've had to raise our workers pay, you know, we're now competitive with McDonald's or McDonald's is now competitive with what we're paying some of our guys.
And it's like, so it's an odd challenge. We've never really had to deal. You know, across the board wage increases for many of our employees, but we've had to do that in the last year. Uh, I hate to say it well, it's probably going to happen again. I mean, inflate, this inflation thing is going to be around for some time and it's a combination of things.
Yes. We've printed a lot of money and injected this economy with a lot of, lot of liquidity to be able to go out and do this type of stuff. Like, you know, mortgage rates just took another dip this last week because of the 10 year bond came down. But the supply chain challenges just aren't getting any better.
Yeah. We're not talking about the boats on the ports anymore, but that's one of our major issues is getting stuff from overseas and China and all that to build roof trusses, you know, the big triangles on top of your house. They've got these little steel trust plates, gussets, basically that tie all the wood together.
Well, there's about two and a half manufacturers in the United States that provide. One of them that gets their steel domestically. They buy contracts every single year. Like I, this is what we foresee we're gonna need for, uh, steel plates or steel ROS. The other one, which is way bigger, has lived on the open market forever and done very well profitably.
Well, that's the one we've got and they're getting most of theirs from China, which are stuck. All that steel is stuck on boats, on the ports. So we were putting on, on an allocation last may. So we're trying to mitigate that. You know, we got more custom, more home builders that are wanting to build more homes a year.
Cause there's plenty of people knocking on their door. Like, Hey, I want a house. I want to move. I want to do something. And yet we're restricted on being able to supply anymore. So it's like, it's kind of a perfect opportunity where people are knocking on our door that want more material from us, but we just can't and we have to not necessarily pick and choose, but who's first to the table basically, you know, who's been the most loyal to us and I got that phone call.
Did you? I sure did. Yeah. Now did you say there's two and a half supplier? Did you mean to say that I have supplier. I know there's no camera on us right now, but there's one that's about from the, from the desktop here is about three foot tall. The second one's about a foot tall and the half one's about five inches just based on size of how market share.
So if there's other lumberyards transplants here in the Omaha, Lincoln, All of them use that big guy. Got you. Yeah. I got that call from Steve, unfortunately asking me to remain loyal and that's, you know, that's a crazy other topic in this, in this crazy ride we're in right now. We've, we're usually blindly loyal is what they call it in our office.
At least of you just order you don't get quotes and it's as you're moving as fast as we're moving as same as you guys, I'm sure it, it helps to have blind loyal. You know what price you're going to get. You know, you can work it out if something happens. And that's what we prefer. We've been blindly loyal to Millard for quite awhile, I think six or seven years.
But when something like this happens and like you were talking where one supplier might be buying lumber to different costs, one might be pinched. They might be. So the lumber sitting on their floors, 20 to 30% cheaper, higher than the other suppliers. We've, we've had to move away from that, which just creates more hours in the office more, you know, before you send a blueprint off to Miller lumber and they supply absolutely everything for the entire house almost right.
And they just get it there. When you tell them, you know, now we're at a different supplier for about everything. Cause obviously, you know, the window problems, the lumber problems fix your problems. A little bit of everything right now. Right. So it's really put a cramp on that, that blind loyalty, but it has an, you know, the supply chain challenges.
You know, they're probably in the future for the next few years going to be a remaining issue. Um, uh, the economy was starting to do well in 20 18, 20 19. We finally saw some momentum kickoff, especially in the home construction industry. You know, we've been in a 15 year depressed housing construction, so.
You know, ever since 2008, boom, everyone was hit hard. There was builders that went out of business. They had too many specs in the ground. Um, lumberyards, you know, they had too much inventory and no sales. They had to liquidate. So there was major, major pullbacks after the 2008 housing financial reset. So we had about a 15 year cycle of lack of housing construction happened and it finally started to kick off.
And now we're seeing it where there's very few existing houses on the market. We can't build houses fast enough because the supply chain challenges, labor challenges, transportation challenges. So we're not going to solve the 15 year depressed housing cycle in two years. Um, I know everyone wants to jump on board and get it done, but.
With a broken supply chain system from COVID. I mean, a lot of the lockdowns that we dealt with back in 2020, I think have a lot of a big effect on what's going on today. And there was a lot of other states that remained locked down way longer than Nebraska. I mean, we were buying a lot of windows from New Jersey from Wisconsin, and those states weren't that friendly for business.
We're trying to get windows out of those areas and they're locked down for business and it's like, well, you're under a contract. We want to value our relationship with Marie. Well, I don't know what to do. We can't get windows. And so we've had to actually push, pull back on like what some of our product offerings, like I love selling Anderson when.
Or windows in general, but with our lead times right now, which they're not our fault, they're not your fault. We can't push them. Yep. We hope to someday be able to do that again and, you know, expect you to come back and buy as many product categories as we sell. So you come back home, but we understand you have a business to run.
You have commitments, you have homeowners with probably a, some sort of construction loan or something someone's paying interest on any delays that you have. So again, So you kind of briefly mentioned that you think this might be a couple more years. Is that, that kind of what is going through the industry?
The last, I would have to say before this last spike, you know, into December, I was, I was talking to somebody in the industry, whether it was Miller. Or meet or somebody every day, just to kind of get, you know, get what everybody's opinion is. Get you guys have a little bit more insight on the supply chain and supplies than I do.
Um, and everybody was thinking that the end of 2021 was going to be it. And then. I admit we've just been so busy. I haven't stayed on top of it as much as possible. Right. But you know, just everybody listening, you know, when he's saying we were three, four or $500 per thousand linear feet on the futures index, I think we ended yesterday, mid 13 hundreds.
Didn't we, and today it was limited maxed up again on futures. Before I left my office to come down here. Every day seems to be a new day where we see a new challenge that has a causation effect that you won't see for weeks or months down the road. Um, a couple of weeks ago, last week and the week before a couple of, of major lumber mills up in Canada announced some curtailments and shutdowns curtailments.
Uh, one of them used to operate and produce lumber six days a week. They announced last week that they're shutting down to three days a week and that's every single mill in the British Columbia area. Why are they doing that? Um, people might've seen on social media last year, that there's miles and miles and miles of bunks of lumber stacked up as high and far as you can see.
That's true. Um, there's, you know, from the mill up in Canada to a reload in Kansas city to the lumberyards, Those areas are full down channel. So the mills can't produce any more because they're full. They have to get rail cars down to that. Reload. Reload can't take any more on because they can't empty their yard.
Find enough truckers to get it to your local level. Holy cow. So that's one thing after the other. So yeah, there's gluts of lumber in different parts of the supply chain that they can't release because they can't get enough truckers. Well, the mills aren't producing anymore. So yeah, eventually you'll see the lumber and all those different points get to you and you might see a major price decline.
But the mills have been shut down or lack of production for however many weeks is going to go on for then we're gonna have another pop. It's going to pop back up. We call it the dead cat bounce after it comes down. I mean, it's until we can get on a smooth transition where from point a to all the way to point Z the lumberyard your job lot until we can get that smooth.
I see a rollercoaster for many years and you know, we're just talking lumber. We're not talking crowded doors. We're not talking windows. We're not talking exciting. They all have different effects to, um, windows. We could have another episode all about that grass doors, doors. Holy cow. Thank goodness. I don't supply any of those.
I've heard those lead times are like infinity and beyond or something. Once again, you know, we were loyal to the overhead garage doors. We went from, we went from four to eight to 12 to 16. I think we're sitting at 20 to 24 right now on certain garage doors. Uh, just ordered a new garage door for the pole barn.
We're putting up out, back from, I got the pole barn package from Menards. The pole barn package will be here in, uh, March 20th. So we're talking two, three weeks, the garage door for it, which is a standard non insulated garage. Won't be here until July 30th, July 29th. Yeah. So it's just, it's just crazy, you know, windows we go on and on when Anderson windows 20 to 24 weeks, if not, I heard eight to 12 months now for Anderson 100 series of black, black, black blacks.
For some reason, the paint on the interior of the black black window has a different chemical compound. And I don't know what I'm not a chemist or anything like that, but they can't get the raw materials to produce that interior type of. Like it's stuck on a ship or something or somewhere it's stuck.
And so they're basically throwing their hands up in the air, like 10 months, this, our lead time. Yep. That's what we just heard. Same or fiberglass for tubs. I mean, you could keep going on and on. And these are some major billion dollar companies. Anderson windows is a major, big, big company and they can't get their hands around.
Yeah. So you know, us as local lumberyards or other local suppliers, overhead doors. I don't work with them that much, but they probably have a great reputation and it's not their fault. Yep. Yeah. The last week called Cecil at overhead door. He's great. Been supplying our doors for years. His answer was, he just doesn't know.
He's not told what will be on the truck when it gets here. And he's not told when it was. And so even though you're frustrated at him and his lack of response, you realize that it's not his fault. Right. You know, it's, it's, it's tough. And, and that's part of what I want to bring to our, to our listeners is not feel sorry for us mentality.
It's if you are a building and even if it's not with us, you know, have a little mercy. On on, on don't shoot the messenger, right? We're only providing you the information that we can be provided. And I've, I've learned throughout this deal, the information that you guys are provided might not even be sufficient, you know, and it's never been like that before.
And it's, it's really tough. And just give everybody an understanding of what we're dealing with. It's not one industry, it's not just you. Um, you know, you get some of those clients that they, they think that they're the only one that's happening to. And unfortunately it's not. I kind of wish it was actually.
Yeah. And unfortunately I've seen some homeowners. They, they see the value that they can get out of selling our house today. And they might even pull that trigger and sell their house and find an apartment and think that they can start building a house and there'll be moved in and buy, you know, before fall.
I don't think that's how the world works anymore. Um, so I feel bad for some people that might've made that decision, but again, whatever equity you picked up and selling your house, maybe made 50 or a hundred grand more than your. You're putting that into a new house, the cost of materials. I mean, housing affordability is a major challenge.
We need more houses. There's a lack of housing, but the input costs, the raw material costs. The labor costs 1.9% unemployment in Nebraska. We have the lowest unemployment rate in any state in all of history, minus maybe South Dakota right now who has 20 people up there. But, um, It's a major challenge. I mean, like I'm about 30, 40 guys short in my manufacturing plant, the trust shop, the wall panel shop, and we've had to get creative on how we, you know, take care of those employees, extra benefits, extra money just to attract them over here because it's labor is a challenge.
Yeah, it's it's crazy. I was actually just in a conference in grand island. We launched, uh, with the economic development department there yesterday and Governor Pete Ricketts was there and gave some of these statistics and it was, it was staggering and, and hopeful, but it's, um, it's, it's crazy what we're dealing with right now.
Yeah. And again, the, I look at housing starts nationwide, you know, every month when they come out. We're at number is way higher than before COVID ever happened. So, you know, we're competing with Texas people building slapping houses together in Texas. You and I are competing against them because they're buying a lot of our raw materials that you need to build a house.
So, you know, Texas is on fire. Florida's on fireworks. We've gotten phone calls from home builders in Florida, asking if we can manufacture roof trusses for them and ship them down there. Well, pay the logistics to get it down there as long as they can find some. No, I already too busy. Yeah. That's a good point to bring up.
We get, you know, one of the, we had the, uh, land Castro home and garden show this a couple of weeks ago. And the biggest question we had was how fast can you build a house or when can you start? And I tell people, we got a great team around us, you know, we're, we're almost big enough now. And with the success we've had in the growth we've had.
We have a lot of our subcontractors almost predominantly worked for us. So it allows us, offers us a lot of flexibility. If we have one client that's in no rush to get into their house and another client that's chipping to get in, we can maneuver some stuff around. I used to be able to tell people we could take your blueprint from the city, you know, four or five days at the city handed off to our excavator.
And within a couple of weeks, we'll be dug and off we go in there starts your five or six month timeline. If you do that now, I think I know the answer, but if I hand you a blueprint today, how far are you out on getting this truck? You know, so we're probably 14 to 15 weeks out. Um, it's, you know, we might hear from our competitors, they might be way less than us or not.
I don't know if it's true or not, but you know, it's true. Part of that steel trust played allocations. A major thing. Part of every builder that we've been working with for many years is just building more houses. And you know, when you have a shortage of labor in your shop, it's hard to run. So I could totally go out and spend a couple million bucks and invest in more manufacturing equipment, my shop.
But if I issue the PO today, I won't get maybe any of that equipment till September, all the steel that goes into building the steel roof tables and a new song. Half a million dollar saw. I won't even see til January right now. Trust me. We've gotten quotes in some of this stuff and we find out these lead times, it's like I could spend a couple million bucks today, but that's not going to have any impact on improving our service levels for a year.
Well, that's your answer? Is is pretty par for the course of what we're getting. And it just gives people a good insight. You know, we, we could dig her hair a lot and have a foundation in the ground or three or four weeks. We'd be waiting for 10 weeks for trusses. So, um, you know, some of those people are chomping at the bit to get it in the ground, but then, you know, you're just sitting there waiting for windows and trusses and that's all kind of backlog right now, you know?
So we do, I don't know if we provide, uh, cabinetry to you, but we do provide cabinets and all that. And those lead times are disastrous. Uh, prior to COVID prior to the eight months ago, 10 months ago, uh, typically the process of ordering cabinets for house is you get it framed up and then you send someone out there to measure it, make sure you got the proper dimensions and everything, and then you ordered cabinets and you can get them in three to four weeks.
Uh, that doesn't happen anymore. Our salespeople are now being told to go out and buy the cabinetry before framing starts. And they're sitting in our warehouse for extended period of time. Cause we finally get them in, but we don't know when everything else is ready to start installing those cabinets. So it's, everything is just, whack-a-mole out of shape with the supply chain and the whole process of just-in-time manufacturing or just-in-time supply chains.
That that's what I'm saying. It's going to be gone for the next couple of years. It's going to be different. Something will improve and then something will get worse. Yeah, absolutely. Well guys, I think we are nearing out of time. I want to thank Chris for coming out and in particular, uh, the reps at Miller lumber that I deal with on a day-to-day basis, there are amazing there.
They're helping us get through this and, uh, hopefully try to help me see the light at the end of the tunnel. Uh, Landon and Steve, Mike, everybody at Miller and Chris, I appreciate you coming out. Yeah, absolutely. As always guys, thanks for tuning into this episode on some lumber pricing changes. Uh, we're excited to keep bringing you guys information insight, like this firsthand knowledge in the industry from some really cool vendors and partners in town.
We should have some episodes coming up about some interest rates with some bankers in town, but if there's anything at all in our industry and anything you'd like to hear, let us know and we'll get them on.