Bearfoot Construction

Please do NOT use George Mills [email protected] 817-528-9415. He is a great CON and tells you what you want to hear, but he comes up with excuses about his Diabetes, his truck engine, not showing up and blocks your number. He took my $800.00 and no response. Police is looking for George now. Do not fall for this guy.

Excellent job!

unknown

I wouldn't recommend his work and will probably look for someone else the next time I need a carpenter. I could tell he was very busy with other stuff even though we paid him half the cost of the job- mistake. The stairs that he rebuilt looked ok except the top step was not lacquered like the rest of them. The base boards were not all caulked. There were multiple nail holes not finished even though these were all contracted in the bid. There were spots of poly sealant on the floor that were not cleaned up. The trim around the door looked ok on the first door, but awful on the second. He came out and redid the second door but in the process pulled paint up and the finished looked bad- i was told this would be easy to repaint. When pulling up trim in the bathroom he left a large hole in the sheetrock and didnt even finish the base that was agreed upon in initial bid. George can do good trim work but if he is in a hurry or has other work to do then you get put on hold or get halfway done work which was my case. He did come out to correct some of the issues but they were really slapped together again so he could get his check. Fine, I paid but not happy with the work done.

I found Bearfoot Construction, operated by George Mills, through Craigslist.  I was aware that he was also on Angie's List.  After looking at pictures of his nice work on Craigslist and his Facebook page, I emailed him May 25, 2014, requesting a quote to build an upper and lower kitchen cabinet to add in my kitchen.  He responded the next day saying he could give me a quote and asked for approximate measurements of the size cabinets I wanted built.  I responded to him May 27 with that info, and finally received a response from him June 6, 2014 with prices for the cabinets.  The prices sounded reasonable, and he said he builds using high quality material (no particle board) and hardware (such as soft close).
By the time I received a quote from George after first contacting him, I had decided I wanted to install shelving instead of an upper cabinet, but wanted to move forward with having a bottom cabinet built, and I let him know via email.  He asked me to give him a call to arrange an appointment.  On Tuesday June 10, I spoke with George on the phone and we arranged for him to come to my house the following week on Wednesday June 18 (I was on vacation that week so I knew I would be home).  Several times I stated "next week" and he told me he was writing down in his calendar June 18 and would give me a call before heading to my home.  Well, the very next day (June 11) while driving to work I have a missed call and voicemail from George.  I listen to the voicemail and he says that he is calling to let me know he is on his way to my house.  At that point I was thinking he must have called the wrong number and he couldn't be driving to my house because my appointment is the next week.  I called him back and sure enough he said he was going to my house.  I had to remind him the appointment was the following week.  He was a little confused, which is fine, but didn't he tell me the day before he wrote me in his calendar for June 18? Oh well.
Fast forward to the next week, and George is due at my house at 8 am on Wednesday June 18.  George did not call before to tell me he was on his way, and by 8:10 am, I assumed he had forgotten my appointment.  I called him  to find out if he was still coming, and he told me he had completely forgotten my appointment.  He said he had been so busy that week, and so on, apologized profusely, and asked if he could come later in the day.  Since I was on vacation, I said it was fine and we agreed to meet at 12 that same day (let me point out that if I had not been on vacation that day, I would have been very mad about staying home from work to wait for him).  I left my house to run some errands and George called around 11 am saying he had finished his last job a little early and wanted to know if he could go ahead and come by my house.  Even though I was in the middle of running errands, I agreed that he could come to my house early and I went home to meet him.  George was there waiting when I got home, and he came in and spent about 30 minutes taking measurements and discussing how I wanted the cabinet built.  He tried to fix a broken drawer for me, and we discussed adding soft close drawer brackets to fix the problem, which he said he could do when he came back to install the cabinet.
 While George was taking measurements, he asked for a deposit of $200 (the total project cost was $300).  While I thought that was a pretty steep price for a deposit (I would rather have paid about 20-25% for a deposit), I felt like he would do a good job and didn't expect him to start building something for free, so I gave him a check.  He gave me a written receipt for the deposit along with the quote, and said his wife would email me an official written contract by the end of the week.  He said the turnaround time would be 4-6 weeks officially, but more likely he would have it done in about 3 weeks.  The next day, the deposit check I gave George was already cashed.  Anytime I have hired someone to do work, I've never had someone cash a deposit check until my project is already complete, so that made me a little nervous.  When I did NOT receive the emailed contract from his wife by the end of the week, I was even more nervous.  He said he had been busy so I gave it the weekend to wait for the contract.  I finally emailed George the next week on Tuesday asking for the contract.  He said he thought his wife had already done it- I got the contract the next day, which was a week after George had come to take measurements.  Now to wait for the cabinet.
The week after, George called me Tuesday July 1 and left a voicemail asking to call him back.  I was surprised and thinking he had already finished my cabinet.  I called him and he told me that the previous week (when it had been raining/flooding almost every day) the paperwork with my cabinet measurements had fallen out of his truck into a puddle of water and ruined.  He wanted to know if he could come back to my house to re-measure the cabinet.  I understood, as things happen, and we scheduled for him to come back July 2 at 6 pm.  On July 2, George called around 5:30 pm stating that he was stuck at a job he was doing until around 9pm that night, and wanted to come the next day, July 3, at 6 pm.  Once again, I am understanding and agree to change the appointment.  On July 3, 6pm rolls around and George has not shown up or called.  He finally calls me at 6:10 saying he just left his house and is driving to my house (which is from Keller to Bedford, so not a short drive during rush hour traffic).
At that point, I was beyond furious.  I had already been very understanding of all of these things that had come up.  I fully expected George to be punctual seeing as how he had canceled on me the day before.  I waited for George to show up and finally at 6:55 pm he still had not shown up (all the while I am waiting for him so that I can continue on with the other things I had planned for that evening).  So, I called George and asked where he was and if he would be at my house soon.  George said we could re-schedule (yeah, AGAIN), but I really just wanted him to hurry up and get there, get the measurements and get out.  After going back and forth, George suggested that we just cancel the whole thing and that he return my deposit.  I thought that sounded great since George is clearly too busy with other projects to be on time.  However, George had a door to one of my cabinets that he had borrowed so that he could build me an exact match.  George said he would go ahead and bring me my money, but I told him I wanted both the money and the cabinet door back at the same time (because I assumed I would never see that door again if he had already given me my money back).
George said he would bring both my door and money to me the next day, and leave it on my front porch.  I thought that was odd because the next day was a holiday (July 4).  Later that night, I started thinking I didn't want George just leaving money on my front porch, so I emailed him to ask him to ring my doorbell so I would be aware my money and door were back (and not sitting there for someone to take).  He emailed me back immediately saying he was not going to be in town and it would be the following Monday.  Once again, George is not doing what he says.  I emailed him again saying he said you would drop it off July 4...basically it was a back and forth argument, with me calling him out for not following through with what he says, and him basically saying I'm lying that he said he would come on July 4 and I'm being ridiculous.  Look, I understand that he is going out of town and it is a holiday, but don't tell me one thing, and then change it to another later just because you can't remember anything.  With George's track record of being so forgetful, yeah, he said July 4 in the first place. &

Ours was a really big job and he took a few weeks to return an initial bid. When we received the bid and decided to move forward with him, he finalized the materials list and, prior to us purchasing the materials, he disappeared off the face of the earth. We never heard a word from him or his wife and no one returned our phone calls. We were about to go with someone else when we finally heard from him two weeks later. He claimed he had been in the hospital. When we finally got the project rolling there was yet another hitch: George said he broke his wrist and was out for another two weeks. It's hard to say whether any of these things actually happened, or whether he was working other jobs and making excuses to cover himself. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because I actually liked him as a person.
When you are able to get him there, I think he does a good job. I think that our job was very overwhelming for him: a 2300 sqft house full of trim is a lot of work for any one person. He had time management issues and would routinely underestimate the time it would take him to finish various projects. But the work he did was of high quality and we are still very happy with it.
We probably spent close to $10,000 with him (not including materials). 
However, the reason I cannot recommend George, in spite of the good quality of his work, is because he walked off the job before he was finished. He had a TON of small things that he said he would wrap up, like caulking (there was a LOT of caulking) and installing small pieces of trim here and there that had been removed or had yet to be installed for various reasons. I suspect he was anxious to start another job and once he realized how much "little" stuff was still left to do, it wasn't worth his time to finish. Needless to say, we were and still are extremely disappointed in his decision to throw away a good working relationship and future reference. What he did was highly unprofessional and I cannot in good conscience recommend his services for this reason alone.
Work I would NOT have George do:
- Tile (Our kitchen backsplash leaves something to be desired. I question whether he had ever done a tiling job this big before.)
- Paint (We paid George to paint two interior doors, and not only is the paint sloppy, but the color is not the one we specified.)
- Sheet rock (The little bit of sheet rock work George did for us was pretty sloppy.)
George is proficient at:
- Trim (He installed all of the custom trim, stairs and railing in our home.)
- Framing (He rebuilt the decking of our front porch and re-framed some of our interior doorways.)
Ensure that he finishes EVERYTHING before paying him because we had a tough time getting him to finish projects. The $200 we held back at the end was definitely not enough money to motivate him to fully complete the job.