Sometimes when you have a takeoff and recieve a bid, if you make the decision to go with that lumber yard, they will honor that bid and only increase 5% even if the lumber has gone up higer than that. Engineered is more involved as far as the production aspect and could be a supplier that is a distance and they are using fuel surcharge costs as a reason to raise the pricing. Back in '05 when we framed our build, dimensional stayed at a level, the engineered went up, but our lumbie stuck with the bid price and never raised it to even 5%. Our build has around 75% engineered lumber involved in the framing so we were lucky. I would talk with them and see what they can do for you since you are getting the whole house package from them. A lot of times that is leverage on your behalf. Talk with the owner if possible.

That is strange. I had recently posted on another thread that there seem to be big drops going on it framing lumber and drywall. I'm always amazed at building materials, though. It seems inevitable that everything should soon be going down, given the doom and gloom you hear about the housing market.

Time will tell, but you don't have that luxury, I guess.

I fear that moving the wall between the pantry/powder room and the kitchen is problematic as there are some critical steel columns buried in that wall...The other alternative I have been thinking about is sliding the whole set of base cabinets that the main sink is in towards the eating area. I could then widen the island by the same amount. The only thing that it might impact is the symmetry...as the island would no longer be centered on the range...it would be offset by 4-5" or so. Would that be a problem? The advantage is that I could have a 4' wide island with full cabinets on both sides. I could have my dish storage on the sink side, and a second prep sink on the fridge side...

Are you getting bids from more than one place?
Also, even more than price changes, make sure your framer does a take off of the job from the plans. Have the lumber yard do the same. And then do some comparing. Our lumber bill went over budget more than 30 grand because we failed to do this properly. And the framers were very wasteful.

Pls ignore my last message. it was meant for another board, and of course, there is no way to delete it once posted. Sorry!