Charlie:
Fred in Cypress, says to us, he’s looking at what builders are doing in his area, up in Cypress.
Tom:
Okay.
Charlie:
He says, “One of them is using OSB for roof and walls instead of plywood.” And, he understands that OSB was a bad product. “It fell out of favor”, he says, “about 10 years ago.” But for you of course, I know it’s forever Tom.
Tom:
Yeah.
Charlie:
“I’m looking”, he says, “To build and plan to pay the extra cost to go with plywood, or has OSB caught up?”
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Tom:
Say OSB went out of favor, because it’s cheap, and production builders use it all the time. A lot of builders use it a lot. But, it’s not something that I would recommend either, to use. I wouldn’t recommend it now. It hasn’t changed any. It’s just still cheap, and readily available, and a lot of builders use it because of the cost.
But, no, I’m still a plywood guy, and if you go into windstorm areas, you’ve got the use plywood. You can’t use OSB. And, if you look at a lot of the hurricane areas. A lot of places have been hit by a hurricane afterwards, where the roof deck is missing, or in some of these tornadoes that his some of the neighborhoods in the last few months here in Texas. You look at the roof decking. The ones that lost their decking were primarily OSB roofs. They were not plywood roofs.