Acny Developers

We used ACNY for a gut renovation on our 3,000 sq foot apartment in NYC and it was an absolute nightmare! Owner Bill Cook promised us the job would be done in 6 months but dragged it on for ONE YEAR, while constantly demanding money from us eventhough he was obviously not reaching milestones that he had set himself in our contract & money wasn't due to him. Cook understaffed our project- apparently he was in the midst of developing a building in Harlem (109 E. 115th St) for himself and using his staff & resources for his personal project instead of for our job which we kept paying him for despite his delays. He was also constantly having issues with sticking to the architectural plans although he obviously bid on the plans at the outset; he needed constant meetings with the architect and all along the project would claim that he could not stick to the plans as they were so he drummed up change orders adding a whopping 26% to our contract! On top of all this he kept pushing us to buy merchandise (fixtures, etc) from his showroom (Atmosphere Kitchen & Bath) which we did do until I realized that he was more focused on getting us to purchase products than finishing our construction at which point I stopped purchasing from Atmosphere. Bill Cook was foul mouthed and nasty to us and would hound us for money on a daily basis, again, eventhough money was not due to him because he had yet to reach his milestones. He made our lives a living nightmare, and all this while our Co-op's board started threatening to charge us a huge daily fine for having gone past the permitted time for construction. We finally decided to hire a professional Project Manager so that we could get Bill Cook out of our lives, and we demanded that he no longer communicate directly with us since his communication was actually daily harassment (4-5 calls & text msgs daily).Our Project Manager suggested that since Bill was not reaching the milestones in the contract (which Bill had originated) & the contract had a bunch of payments due at the end, that we allow Bill to create a revised Milestone/Timeline Document which would speed up payments to Cook since he seemed so desperate for the money. We agreed to do that, and even with his own revised timeline Bill Cook was not able to reach milestones. After we paid him 90% of the contract (on top of all of the change orders we had paid him); Bill Cook pulled off the job although he was at most 75% complete! After he pulled off we found a ton of faulty work that needs to be remedied by other contractors including the electric work which requires ripping up walls again (!!!). Bill Cook is about as incompetent and unethical, swindling Contractor that anyone can hire and I recommend that you run far, far away from him and do not do business with this guy!! Save yourselves from being robbed by him and save yourselves a lot of aggravation and torture.