From where we sit Pine is not cheap wood. Actually it’s price has risen dramatically in the last 10 years. Construction grade ply has gone up, not to mention the higher quality required to build furniture.
At Durham Bookcases, when we build an unfinished pine bookcases, we use
furniture grade plywood and solid wood. This means that we can’t buy
the plywood you see at construction sights or in racks at Home Depot or
Lowes. It just won’t cut it (pardon the pun).
how pine plywood costs had over doubled since 2003 [1]. This raised the cost for the construction industry and for us as well. We saw the cost of our pine go crazy. Probably because the U.S. government bought a couple thousand
train car loads of the stuff in the early 2000′s to send to the middle
east. Our solution…look for something else. We continued to offer pine to those who really wanted
it, but it cost as much as oak or maple. So why bother?
Towards the end of 2011, we’re finally able to find furniture grade radiata pine [2] plywood
and appropriate solid wood for the trim. Why the change in costs? I
don’t know, but my guess is that we’re coming out of a decade of war
and no longer sending as much pine plywood overseas.
How does this affect us or you. Simple. We can finally build
good unfinished pine furniture for a low cost. We’re using the same
construction as the birch bookcases we’ve been building. So it’s not a
matter of lower quality. We just finally found the material we needed
at a price we can handle. It is available to order now and the wood is
here. Hopefully before the end of February, there will be
unfinished pine furniture in our store and on our website (www.thebookcaseshop.com)
once we have pictures.
Look for upcoming posts and tweets (@DurhamBookcases) about our new pine bookcases.
[1]
Simon, Bernard. “Prices for plywood, and its alternative, keep pushing
higher.” The
New York Times,
10 Apr. 2004,http://http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/business/pric…(accessed
Jan. 10, 2012).
[2] Radiata pine offers
a pine grain without as many knots as other varities.
January 10, 2012
Fletcher (Durham Bookcases)
