BrickUnderground

Q: I just bought a condo and the cabinets are all peeling. It looks like a vinyl-type contact paper that’s peeling. How can I repair them??? I have no money for new cabinets.

There’s pressed board under the vinyl—can I paint the board? How do I prep it?

A. Our BrickTank experts presented a range of options besides replacing the cabinets: While your financial outlay will be less than brand new, you will still need to spend some money.

shaft en freude - n. Delight triggered by a less-than-flattering view of a neighbor or neighbor's apartment across an airshaft.

Glancing into the toy-crammed living room across the way, Monica felt a tingle of shaftenfreude over the fact that her own children were long past the Big Toy phase.

This week’s New York Magazine takes a riveting look at how wealthy Upper East Siders are dealing with our city’s bed bug epidemic.

In a word: Quietly.

One exterminator says he receives 50 to 75 calls about UES bed bugs every week:

His clients include movie directors, hospitals, white-shoe law firms, high-end schools, and “titans of Wall Street I can’t name to you or they’d crush me.”

Love thy neighbor? Tell us about it for our ongoing "Good Neighboring" series featuring first-person accounts of a kindly act by a past or present neighbor.

Now's your chance to say thank you--and inspire a fellow vertical dweller--by sending us your Good Neighboring story! If your story is the best, we will send you a $25 Starbucks gift card so you can thank your neighbor over frappucinos and 400-calorie pound cake.

It was my first time buying an apartment--a one-bedroom co-op in an elevator building--and I didn’t know what to expect at the board interview.

I had heard a lot of different things and was told I could be rejected for any reason.

I shouldn't have scheduled our open house from 10 to 11:30 am this past Sunday; it was early, rainy and not a soul showed up.

To add insult to injury, StreetEasy had mistakenly taken down my listing on Saturday and sent an email to the people tracking the apartment that it was, wrongly, no longer on the market.

But that's OK. Why, you ask?