Meet Curtis Love | C.Love

We had the good fortune of connecting with Curtis Love and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Curtis, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I think first and foremost was the need for more income. We all want to have more financial security and freedom and this felt like a good way to make it happen. I kind of accidentally became a creator for YouTube in October of 2019 with the floating bed frames and have expanded since then. Family and friends know that I can create awesome things with wood as I’ve always loved to build and make, but that was pretty much the limit of my reach. I wanted to get to a larger audience and I figured I could give YouTube a shot. The *first* video I produced has 1.5MM views to date(06.23.2024) and has really helped to propel the growth of my carpentry aspirations. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I’m pretty good and editing/producing YouTube videos and I like to talk to and help people in general, so things just worked out pretty well. I feel like we can get a lot more done and live lives that are much happier if we have some since of community and can help each other. When you are able to create and/or are able to share either the creations or the methods of creation, there is some mysterious connection that spans all people. I like for us to be connected in some kind of way and I feel like a small part of me is trying to do that with the things I create and the things I do.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I like to create things that are useful or functional but also easy to look at. For this I’d point to either the chaos cutting boards or the cedar blue bird houses I’ve made. In some of the videos, you will see snippets of a vortex water fountain that I spent about 2 years developing…I’m not ready for a full reveal on that one yet though.

Other people have made chaos style cutting boards but it doesn’t seem like a real common thing. For the right people, they are very attractive and instant sellers at a Saturday morning small town market type set up. The blue bird houses I make are very unique in appearance to me. I follow a pretty standard set of measurements to build them, but the ‘live edge’ features that I incorporate are something that I just don’t see other people doing. This makes the build quite a lot harder as there is more time needed for selecting the boards and planning the cuts, but they turn out one of a kind in my opinion.

I think I’m most proud of how far the main Youtube channel has gone in helping the mental health of people who visit and build a floating bed frame for themselves. I’m approaching comments from 100 different countries and I really, really never could have anticipated the number of comments I’ve seen from people all over the world pointing out how much better their lives are because they did something so seemingly easy. This was a surprise side effect of the YouTube channel that was a gift straight from God. I didn’t know that was going to happen but I am very glad that it did.

I’ve been at my day job for 13 years and a YouTuber for almost 5, though, I haven’t posted a new video in about 8 months currently. You need to have a good work ethic. You need to be reliable. You should be accurate, on time, efficient, and consistent. Doing all these things all at once all the time is quite exhausting, but we have to do the best we can. No, it wasn’t easy. I’ve had personal and professional challenges that felt to great to overcome, but persistence is key if you are going to get to where you want to be. I’m still not there, and at times, maybe am not pushing as hard as I should be, but as long as the end goal is in focus, you should be able to get there with the right amount of effort and determination.

Some lessons I’ve learned: You should always treat people with respect…treat them how you want to be treated as we’ve always been taught. We have our good days and we have our bad days, but it is important to remember that co-workers, friends, and family members around us are also going through some of those same things and emotions. If we are able to have some kind of connection and share our life experiences, things seem to become a little more manageable for all of us. You need to prioritize the things that are important. Getting 8 hours of sleep every night is pretty critical to having a good day the next day. Chocolate milk comes from brown cows. You need to take the time to maintain your tools, your body, and your mind. Don’t over extend yourself. Help support whoever you reasonably can. Pray about it.

I want to bring people together in a community where we can work along side each other to share ideas and methods of creation so we can live more comfortable lives. Also taught to most of us from a young age is that you can achieve anything you want to. This is only the second interview I’ve been approached about participating in, but it’s light years away from where I thought I could get to when I started. I think certain things do have to line up for one to consider themselves ‘successful’, but success is also relative. Having bags and bags of money and fame isn’t what everyone is after. We aren’t going to get rich quick so we have to do the best we can with what we’ve got and be as comfortable as we can be while we are doing it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Hah, which best friend? I’m sure it would be some combination of golfing, swimming, bowling, shooting guns, woodworking projects, and awesome food. Here in Texas, and especially in Houston, we have *all* of the food. We can go wherever we want to really. Maybe float the river in San Marcos as that is an impossibly fun and funny thing to do. We’d go ride the wave runners because you just can’t stop laughing while you are riding one…I call it a boatercycle because that is more fun to me. Given the current climate of our society, I don’t really go out a whole lot to say a museum or a concert very much but these would be fun things to do. Visit a saw mill and see how that operation works. We might go and play a couple games of Texas Hold ’em Poker at a co-workers house. I’m not much of a fisherman, but I would go and do that if that was part of the plan. We might just sit there on the back patio and watch the birds, appreciating the calm and peaceful ambiance of the morning. We are probably gonna take a nap some time because if we have a week of off time, we are going to catch up on some rest haha. In the end, it would depend on who it was that was coming to visit, but with the right amount of effort, we could come up with a really good plan for things to do.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Hannibal Hayes, owner of Economy Carpentry, Painting, & Concrete. A truly one of a kind soul, the best boss anyone could ever dream of, the best friend you never imagined could exist, “A maker of men”. This legendary man is a contractor in Manhattan, Kansas that I worked for in my early 20’s for a couple of years doing some of the hardest physical labor of my life. Right off the bat, he gave us a company truck, a company card for materials/supplies, and instructions for the job to do that day when he called all 13 of us *every single morning*. Every Friday was pay day…we met at his house and sat on the back patio and drank enough beer for a small army. He took us out on the lake and to k-state football games. He showed us what it was like to work like a man and play and party like a man. He gave us responsibility, accountability, and trust from the start. This man has greatly influenced the lives of every person that he has ever come in contact with.

Website: www.curtismadeit.com (under construction)

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curtis_made_it/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-love-b5558b121

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@curtismadeit?si=0E8cDzX7fBF9ieN6