I built a deck last summer, during the heightened wood prices. We had planned it out prior to the prices going dramatically up and it was slightly painful to m

I built a deck last summer, during the heightened wood prices. We had planned it out prior to the prices going dramatically up and it was slightly painful to my wallet, but not nearly as bad as everyone seemed to be making it out to be. Due to the unique design of my deck, we used 2x10x20' pressure treated southern yellow pine for all the joists. I paid $96 each for #1 kiln dried after treatment (KDAT) boards from a local lumber yard. At the time I bought these, Lowe's was selling wet (not KDAT) #2 2x10x20' for about $90 each. Today, Lowe's has those same boards priced at $80 each locally. So if today is after the price slump compared to last year, the prices aren't actually THAT much lower for a rather specialty size of lumber. But it might be easier to get boards now and more common sizes definitely have come down in price. I had about a 3 week wait on some of my lumber and a 2+ month delay on my composite decking boards. All in all, if I had waited to build my deck until this summer I might have saved 10-20% over what I paid last year for all my materials. But I had the time to do the work last year and I do not have the time to do the work this year. And lumber was only about 33% of the total cost of my deck build, the other 67% were non-wood items which have had pretty steady prices like composite decking, aluminum railings, connectors/bolts/screws, waterproofing materials (for under-deck storage), and concrete.