Paul Richards from Milehouse Studios is the reason this channel exists. I told him that to his face in a very hot room in Denver, and he called it disgusting. We talked for a while about how a carpenter from Devon ended up nearly a hundred thousand subscribers deep in two years.

The line from his dad

This is the part that stuck with me most. During lockdown Paul was sitting with his dad watching a video about a Positive Grid amp, and he said out loud, I need that amp. His dad looked at him and said, you’re a salesman’s dream.

His dad meant it as a dig. Paul heard it as a business model. If watching a video made him want the product that badly, then YouTube is not a hobby, it is the biggest shopping channel in the world. He was already building guitars at home and selling them for roughly what they cost to make, just so he could afford to build the next one. The channel was the answer to how you turn that into a living.

Two years later he is closing in on a hundred thousand subscribers.

How he got there

He did engineering at twenty and hated it. His words: strung out, no job satisfaction, you were a cog in a machine. He left it to fit TV aerials on houses, which he describes as the worst paid job he ever had, but it got him doing practical work and it turned him into a carpenter.

He fitted kitchens for twenty years. He says working in people’s houses that long is free therapy, because he could unload his problems on whoever he was working for instead of taking them home to his wife.

It also taught him the thing that makes his channel work. One week he would be sat with a guy who had been smoking weed for a fortnight, the next with a woman who used to work at Buckingham Palace. You learn to change your game. Situational awareness, or as he put it, being a chameleon.

When he told people he was quitting to start a guitar channel, everyone thought he was mad. He also admits the first videos are rough and are still up on the channel. His advice is that everyone’s first videos are bad, so post them anyway and go feet first.

Comparison

I asked him about comparing himself to builders like Texas Toast, whose work he calls perfection and, in person, even more depressing than on video.

He gave me both halves of it. Comparison is the thief of joy, if you want to philosophize. But comparison is also fuel for the fire. If he sees a beautiful guitar he does not get down about it, he wants to go make it, or his own version of it.

That second half is the part nobody quotes and it is the one that actually helps.

Where he thinks the bar is

He was blunt about his own level. Anyone can make a guitar that plays beautifully, that is the easy bit. Doing it consistently is the second easiest bit. Making guitars that look like art is top tier, and that is where he is heading. He names finish work as the gap in his own setup, and Chris at Texas Toast as the person who has it nailed.

He builds something different nearly every week on purpose, trying to build a guitar he has never built. He is working toward narrowing down to about five models so people can order from a lineup. He had just finished a vintage Les Paul copy that he hates, and said the Chinese brand Eart makes a skinnier, more modern take on that shape that he likes considerably better.

On being yourself on camera

His channel premise from the start has been that he does not know what he is doing half the time and he is going to make the mistakes in front of you, so everyone learns together.

I asked whether the crassness is a bit. It is not. He pointed out he knows how to behave at the supermarket. The point he made is that you cannot pretend forever, someone will find you out, and more importantly it will drain you.

That matches something I have been working out in my own forties. You spend your twenties and thirties wondering whether you have to conform, wear the suit, play the game. Leaning into how you actually are is a lot less tiring.

One thing we do not agree on

I mentioned I am taking Fusion 360 lessons from a luthier in the UK I met on a Facebook group. Paul’s response: Fusion 360 broke his soul and made him sell his CNC machine.

I am an IT guy. To me that software is how everything connects together. To him it was the last straw. Both reactions are completely reasonable and I think that is funny.

Go watch his stuff

• Milehouse Studios on YouTube, he is closing in on 100,000 subscribers and has earned it
• Texas Toast Guitars, whose build courses Paul says you would be mad not to take if you are in America
• Guitar Assembly, Martin Harmer, the Fusion 360 lessons that broke Paul’s soul

Follow along

One guy in a small shop on his father-in-law’s property in Lindsborg, Kansas. IT Director by day, maker by obsession. Equal parts problem solver, craftsman, and curious human. If you’re the kind of person who takes things apart to see how they work, or watches people who do, you’re in the right place.

Uncut shop sessions go up on YouTube and I stream on Twitch. Everything is @carverwoodworking. There is merch in the shop, or you can buy me a coffee.