For a few weeks last month in the UK, Thistle MultiFinish building plaster, which generally sells for just over £ 5, sold on the black market for between £ 35 and £ 40.
"I started receiving calls from people I hadn't heard in years asking if I had any," Dan Hall, a builder in Surrey, a county, told Euronews from southwest London. "There are no more left, everything is gone, everything is exhausted."
The construction industry accounts for around 10% of the British economy and was one of the last sections of the British economy to close, with images of canteens filled with construction sites creating controversy a few days after the closure was announced on March 27.
In the end, said Hall, the owner of his own business, HSL Building Services, but who worked extensively on private sites and projects, it was the supply chain that forced the builders British workers to stop working, rather than any government advice.
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Two months later, the problem persists. Even rehabilitated building traders depend on factory stocks, many of which are closed. Supply stores are often reluctant to deliver for fear that staff will fall ill.
"I'm doing work right now and it took me a full eight hour day to prepare all the pieces and deliver them to work. It normally takes me 15 minutes," said Hall.
"It's great that we can work if we are sure, but if we can't get it right, we can't work."
An industry in suspense
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting blockage are felt at both ends of the construction pipeline. Freelancers working on home renovations to megaprojects employing thousands of workers, subcontractors and artisans.
Roni Savage, the founder of Jonas Associates and a civil engineer, says that the industry has seen a huge bottleneck due to the fact that developers cannot sell their current home inventory, and the research suggests the value of £ 82 A billion UK property transactions are pending.
This week, the British government announced that real estate agents would be exempt from the blockade and could return to work. But although this is a welcome development for the housing market, it will take time for the buying and selling pipeline to start flowing again.
"He had a period of seven or eight weeks during which nobody sold any of his shares. So people thought: We are going to develop what we have, but we will stop installing sites, we will stop buying new sites, we will stop planning and that's the problem now, "said Savage.
Another problem is how to apply the guidelines on construction sites so that when work starts again, workers are safe. One of the most difficult measures to apply at both ends of the market is a distance of two meters between workers, especially on a busy construction site.
According to Hall, one of the methods to meet this requirement has been to stagger the trades so that there are fewer workers on site at the same time. The different trades: plumbers, plasterers, carpenters, have different schedules and the sites open earlier and close later so as not to overlap.
But in other areas, construction is actually better equipped to deal with coronavirus compliance than other industries. Personal protective equipment (PPE), for example, has been a legal requirement and a reality on UK sites for a few years.
"The attitude of wearing PPE is already part of the culture," said Hall. "We already wear helmets, gloves, goggles, masks, arm warmers, safety boots, shin guards, so putting a visor on your face won't make much difference."
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However, one of the biggest challenges will be hygiene, because if construction sites are much safer than 20 years ago, they are not much cleaner.
"It's dirty, smelly and sweaty work. Don't bother washing yourself before you go home and take a shower. Then there could be a change in culture," said Hall.
In areas where measures such as social distancing are impossible to apply, testing will be essential to ensure that the construction industry can move again without naturally ending the pandemic or a widely available vaccine, said Savage.
There are industry sectors, such as scaffolding or heavy machinery, where it is impossible not to have two workers nearby. In these cases, only the cheap, easy and widely available tests for COVID-19 will continue the work, he said.
"I think being able to create a system that allows you to test anywhere would be a solution. That would give us confidence: you don't have it, so social distancing doesn't really come into play, "he said.
Despite the uncertainty, Savage is confident that the industry will recover.
"We must continue to be positive and we must continue to press the government to keep the industry going and to prosper." We're not going to crash and burn, we're going to recover, but how long will it take, I don't know, "he said.