The pandemic has sparked a sustained, unprecedented tidal wave of home and backyard projects nationwide. Here's why.
The categories of home improvement surging the most, though, have to do with work outside the home — just outside of it, that is, primarily in the backyard. There has been an almost threefold increase in building decks, and the number of people putting up fences is up sharply as well, according to Anderson.
"Deck construction is up 275%," Anderson says, quoting increases from March to July of this year."Hiring landscapers is at 238%. Fence construction installation is at 144%," Anderson says. And a lot of the work going on in backyards slips under the radar of people like Anderson. Astoria Camille, for instance, is working on a scrappy project behind her mother's home in Kansas City's Troostwood neighborhood. "It used to be a backyard. Now it's a summer oasis with a dipping pool that my mom likes to call a pond," boasts Camille, motioning toward the large, round green plastic stock tank she reused as a swimming pool. The reclaimed yard provides a nice place to relax in a controlled outdoor environment, another factor driving the pandemic building boom.The restaurant Camille works for furloughed her this past spring, so the budget for this project is limited, but like a lot of other do-it-yourselfers and contractors this year, Camille ran into material shortages. The river rock she wanted in order to help set an aquatic theme was nowhere to be found this spring, so Camille had to use 53 bags of pea gravel as a substitute. At 40 pounds a bag, she hauled them from the store in four trips."Demand for outdoor living products is surging," says Nancy Musselwhite, a building materials industry analyst for."Homeowners sheltering in place during peak COVID regulations developed a renewed interest in their backyards, really, as an extension of their home." The big one is lumber. Musselwhite says the supply of treated lumber, the kind that's going into all those new decks and fences, shrank early in the pandemic, as stay-at-home orders slowed production. With the huge spike in demand, prices for deck boards and fence posts more than doubled — and supply dried up. Similar with framing lumber, the type used to make the skeletons of single family homes. Musselwhite says big-box hardware store sales this spring shot up between 25% and 35% over the second quarter of 2019. "If you've been watching a Home Depot and Lowe's, earnings reports, they are killing it this year," Musselwhite says. For Home Depot, sales for the second quarter of this year were $38.1 billion, up 23.4% from last year. Lowe's reported $27.3 billion in sales for the second quarter, compared with $21.0 billion for the same period in 2019. The number of new houses being constructed across the country is up sharply since the pandemic started, and just the added cost of lumber now tacks more than $16,000 onto the price of an average new home,The shortage changed Buhr's home improvement plans. He started building a fence but put the project on hold when he found it impossible to source new fence posts. But that hasn't shut him down. He has found ways to improvise. Stacked neatly in his backyard is a minivan-size pile of gray lumber, all stuff Buhr salvaged from dumpsters and a fence demolition project. "And it's coming in handy since I can't source a lot of the stuff I normally use. So I've been able to build a lot of, a lot of stuff out of this used material," Buhr says. Buhr says this kind of resourcefulness is part of the new normal, finding alternative sources for material, finding workarounds and just doing more with less. He says the pandemic has forced many people to prioritize family life and adopt a more agile approach to their well-being. "It feels like there's kind of a big reset happening," Buhr says."A lot more people are focusing on their family, their homes, you know, the stuff in our immediate vicinity. People's bubbles have shrunk."
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