For a while now, the price of cement for home owners has been rising. This is the case in San Francisco, California and other major cities, like New York and Chicago. After watching it for a few days, I decided to look deeper into this and find out what was going on; how it happened, how much it costs and why.
What you’ll read here are 4 things to know about the cost of cement in your home, before you go and buy anything.
1) The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 2.3% in September from August. Cement prices have risen by 50% since June 2012 (the latest month available).
2) In September 2012 the average price of Portland cement was $390 per ton; around $470 per ton in September 2013. In September 2012, 30% of cement went to construction; in September 2013 that percentage is down to 24%.
3) What seems to be happening is that there’s a shortage of portland cement in the world market. There’s particular shortage of portland cement in China (where 40% of all portland cement is consumed). China has been building up its production capacity over the last 2 years but because most portsland cement is consumed in China that means there
Cement is a building material. Before the invention of cement, the only way to build large buildings was to make them out of bricks. While it’s very useful to have a brick wall, what you often need instead are walls that can bend and flex. A brick wall is not a good thing to live in–it’s brittle, hard to repair, and expensive.
Cement is made out of limestone and clay, which are very common minerals. If you go hiking in your area, you can probably find some limestone for free. Clay is not free; it costs money to harvest it–but then so does cement.
When we talk about the cost of cement for homeowners, we are talking about price per tonne. The cost varies from place to place–because it depends on how much limestone and clay there are nearby–but let’s assume we’re talking about Portland, Oregon, where they have lots of limestone but few clay deposits.
First please note that Portland is not unique in this regard; many cities have access to limestone. In fact many cities also have access to clay! And Portland has more than enough clay for its needs (about 500 million tonnes). So the price there is just a function of supply and demand and some luck: if there
In the past, cement was very inexpensive. This meant that you could build a house for $10,000 or less. A house like this would have been made of wood and cost about $10,000. It would be two stories on the first floor and one story on the second floor. It would have a small kitchen, a bathtub with a showerhead instead of a shower curtain, and probably no indoor toilet.
Today’s houses are built with cement. But the old house had no cement and the new house has lots of it. How much does cement cost? The answer depends on what kind of cement is used in your region, how much cement is needed to make a 2-story house like an old one, how much each 2-story part costs, what happens if there is an earthquake, and how many people are building them at once. You can find estimates for how much it costs in your area by looking at local newspapers such as your local newspaper or on the Internet.
The average cost for two-story home construction in California is about $2.5 million.
Cement: It’s very cheap, or it is the most expensive thing in your house. The price of cement is an odd thing to be pricing. You’re buying a product which is usually made from sand, clay, and water—so you’re paying for the price of sand and water. But there are some important things you can do with cement beyond just making concrete.
One of the things that makes cement so expensive is that it has a high energy content—it takes a lot of energy to get it from the ground to the building site, and a lot of energy to make cement in place when it arrives.
The energy cost of cement comes from the manufacture of cement. But there’s also a transportation cost: driving cement from quarries to construction sites consumes more petroleum than shipping concrete by ship from coast to coast. So you have to build roads as well as houses even if you don’t want buildings made of concrete.
In a way, the cost of cement is like the price of eggs. It’s also like the price of gasoline, bottled water, and coffee. For most things that you buy in bulk, the price depends on how much you buy and how much it costs to make it.
But the price of cement is different. For one thing, the cost of cement is really high: $1.86 per pound (or about 2.5 cents per kilogram). That’s a lot higher than the cost of most other things, which tend to be fractions of a cent per pound or less. But it’s not always higher: sometimes it’s lower than before.
For example, there are places in the United States where it costs 98 cents per pound to make cement for bricks and concrete blocks; those places are Florida, Kansas City Missouri and Portland Oregon, for example. The price dropped from $2.74 per pound in 2011 to 98 cents in 2012 because China cut its production by 25% and some other countries increased their output as well.
If you want to know how much it costs to build a house, you can’t just look at the price of cement. The cost of building a house depends on many things, including the number and quality of the materials used, the level of craftsmanship, the size and location of the house, and many other factors.
In some parts of America, for example, experts say that new houses are so expensive because younger homeowners keep adding rooms and bathrooms. In other places, young homeowners are thrifty and building their own homes from materials that are cheap. In still others, builders have turned to white cement because it is cheap and easy to work with.
If you want to understand prices in your area, you need to look at more than cement alone. You have to know about all the other things that influence prices for each different kind of home.
Humans are not very good at estimating how long things will last.
The reason is that our brains are structured to work in the present, not the future. This means that we tend to think in terms of “right now” rather than “forever.” We may be able to defer decisions for a few months or years, but we can’t defer them forever.
A few decades ago the idea that roads would have to be replaced every 30 years or so was almost unimaginable. Now, some neighborhoods in the west have been on a 30-year cycle for half a century, and people still don’t see anything wrong with it. The reason is simple: There’s no time frame in which the maintenance costs of roads become high enough to demand replacement.
When buying a house, you’re making an investment that will pay off for decades, perhaps your lifetime. Unless you want to live in a shack without any heat or electricity, you should expect your house to last at least as long as you would like it to.