Every year the pattern repeats: our phones are quiet in January, busy in February, and ringing off the hook by late March — and by then the April and May framing slots are spoken for. If you're a GC or developer planning a spring start in Minnesota, the Dakotas, or Wisconsin, the work you do in the next four to six weeks decides whether you're framing in April or waiting in line until June. Here's what we'd lock down now, roughly in order of lead time.
1. Get your framing bid out now, not with the April wave
A plan set that lands on our desk in January gets a careful takeoff, a plan walk, and honest feedback on constructability and schedule. The same set in April competes with a stack of others and gets a number, fast. More importantly, crews get committed in winter — a signed framing contract in February holds your slot; a phone call in April takes whatever's left. If you just need a rough number to test a pro forma, our ballpark calculator gets you in the neighborhood in a couple of minutes.
2. Lock the lumber package while the yards are hungry
Winter is quoting season at the lumberyards, and it's when they're most willing to hold pricing. A few realities to plan around:
- Commodity lumber quotes typically hold for days to a couple of weeks, not months — so lock the package when you sign the frame, not when you mobilize.
- Engineered wood and floor systems carry real lead times, and truss plants that quote two or three weeks out in January can stretch to six or eight once spring orders stack up.
- A package bought and scheduled in winter usually beats one chased in May on both price and delivery certainty.
3. Respect the frost-law calendar
Spring load restrictions post across Minnesota and North Dakota in March most years and stay on for six to eight weeks. That window lands exactly on top of the April rush. If your site sits off a posted route, a full lumber delivery or a crane mobilization either doesn't happen or gets expensive. The move is to get heavy deliveries and any big iron to the site while the roads are still frozen, or to build the schedule honestly around the restriction window instead of pretending it won't apply to you.
4. Clear the paper: permits, truss engineering, submittals
Building departments and truss engineers hit their own spring rush. Permit reviews that turn around quickly in winter slow down noticeably by April, and truss shop drawings, floor layouts, and hold-down submittals all need approval cycles before anything gets fabricated. Every week of paper cleared in February is a week of framing you don't lose in May.
5. Site readiness a framer actually cares about
When our crew shows up, four things determine whether day one is productive or wasted:
- Foundation done, backfilled, and on layout — anchor bolts where the plan says, elevations checked.
- Rocked access and a real laydown area, sized for full lumber packages, not a corner of the parking lot.
- Slab or capped floor to work from, with penetrations marked.
- Temporary power and a plowed, drained pad. March sites are wet; plan for it.
What a well-prepped April start looks like
When the bid was signed in winter, the package was bought early, and the site is genuinely ready, framing moves the way it's supposed to — walls up within days of mobilization and floors turning on a predictable rhythm. We've broken down how that sequencing works on bigger projects in our post on multi-family framing schedules, and our for-GCs page covers how we coordinate lead times with your super so the schedule holds.
Planning an April or May start? Send us the plans now and lock the crew before the rush does it for you.