We have hickory floors in our house. Recently, we had to have them refinished because of water damage. The owner of the flooring company was out to our house the last couple of days, working on some mysterious scratches in one location in the great room. All that to say, he was telling us about the current state in the building trades right now.

The Cheyenne area has been a hot market for a few years now. Californians, and maybe especially Coloradans, have been flocking here. Accordingly, home builders have been scrambling to take advantage of the market, in spite of problems with cost and availability of building materials. He said the market suddenly cratered. Sounds like a whole raft of things finally came together to put the brakes on. I think a family with good credit can still get a home loan at about 4.5%; I imagine there are many who don’t qualify for this rate. Whatever the factors are, there are now builders sitting on 8 or 9 spec homes, and it’s not uncommon for them to offer to pay closing costs.

This flooring contractor said that for two years he had been calling his hardwood supplier asking, “Can I get a truck?” Now his supplier is calling him asking, “Do you wanna truck? Do you wanna truck?” He’s got hardwood that he bought at premium prices that’s now worth less. The same is obviously true of all construction materials.

I believe there are a lot of indicators such as you describe in our economy today.


Despite everyone trying to tell us that gasoline is cheaper now. And the jobs report… Despite the labor participation rate.

We're getting all new flooring starting Monday. The whole process from talking to the people to getting an estimator to come out, to ordering the product to having the flooring delivered was around 3 weeks tops.

I had been hearing how they were backed up for months but that obviously isn't the case.

I'm kind of still waiting for the dust to settle. After all the migrations slow down, where the red and blues went. Which areas remain strongly red and which are now diluted with blue.

I have on more intentional move left in my life - I want to make it my last. So trying to avoid moving from blue to a new blue.

I've been meaning to replace some old (20 years) wall to wall carpet. Especially in high traffic areas.

Maybe now is the time to look at new flooring.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
I'm kind of still waiting for the dust to settle. After all the migrations slow down, where the red and blues went. Which areas remain strongly red and which are now diluted with blue.

I have on more intentional move left in my life - I want to make it my last. So trying to avoid moving from blue to a new blue.

I've been meaning to replace some old (20 years) wall to wall carpet. Especially in high traffic areas.

Maybe now is the time to look at new flooring.

Our wall to wall carpeting was around 20+ years old and showing some wear, plus our last dog developed cancer in his nose and would sneeze blood all over the carpet. We cleaned it but you can't get it all out.

This is bad news for me all around...

Cheyenne / Laramie area is one of the places I'm seriously looking at when I pull the pin and get out of this liberal shithole.

I hope this housing market pans out in the next few years or so.

CPD SIG, if you’re not moving for a few years, who knows what the future brings? As far as Cheyenne and Laramie, our son graduated from the U of Wyoming in Laramie. Very similar to Cheyenne with respect to blustery conditions, except Laramie is 7000’ and Cheyenne is 6. Neither place has easy (six month) winters. I used to say it “keeps out the riff-raff,” that’s not so true anymore. I worry for Wyoming because our population is so small that it could be ruined even faster than Colorado. If that happens, probably western Nebraska; they won’t think of going there.