Teri Karush Rogers

Q. My floor doesn't look good anymore. It's a wood floor that was scraped and finished, and yet in less than three years it looks gray and worn down. What should I do? Should it not have been washed with water? Was it treated wrong, or finished incorrectly in the first place?

A. It looks as though you were robbed—of at least one coat of polyurethane, says BrickTank expert and general contractor Jeff Streich of Prime Renovations in Manhattan.

Co-op board bashing is something of a sport in New York City, so when we ran across this StreetEasy conversation (“Co-op boards: How much power do they really have?”), we prepared ourselves for some horror stories.

Two of our favorite real estate lawyers, Jeffrey Reich and Steven Sladkus of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, have posted a video primer (above) about dealing with secondhand smoke in co-ops and condos. It ends with a reminder that a building-wide ban on smoking is perfectly legal.

But even in the Bloomberg era of restrictions on public smoking, co-op and condos have been conspicuously passive about banning smoking inside apartments.

Plenty of women complain about doormen who seem a little too interested in their private lives. Somewhat rarer are those who insist on private time with their men in uniform.

Real estate attorney Adam Leitman Bailey tells us that he was contacted recently by a condo board confounded by a serial propositioner.

The problem involved a married female condo owner conducting afternoon booty calls targeted at doormen--romancing them with lines that included, “I need to be f----- by one of you now."

Which is worse:  Revealing your finances as a buyer to a co-op board of total strangers….or refinancing your mortgage and having to spill your financial guts to a board now populated by friends and frenemies?

We submit that refinancing is worse—way worse.