I get a lot of "what-if" email from readers, enough of it, in fact, to assume that there are a lot of people in the country unable to make life decisions without intervention.

Fortunately, I'm never asked to weigh-in on things that are too personal. You know, "Al, I met this wonderful woman a couple of weeks ago, but she has two cats and I am allergic to them, and should I tell her about this or should I just be resigned to sneeze constantly for the next 50 years ... ."

It's more like, "Al, we're redoing the living room and dining room. It's going to involve sanding the floors and painting. The floor sander says that the floors should be sanded first and the painter says the painting should be done first. What should we do?"

My answer: Tell your painter that you're allergic to cats.

Just kidding. My advice is to sand first, but don't polyurethane until after the painting is done. It's easier to clean up paint spots from an unfinished floor. The issue is one of cleaning up. Sanding produces more dust and other residue than painting, and that stuff can get all over walls and into just about everything else.

Make sure the painter is careful about splotching or dripping paint all over the place, but the sanding is usually the messier job.

Now that we are heading full steam into the spring housing market, and many areas of the country still have an oversupply of houses for sale, I'm getting a lot of "what-if" questions about improving the chances for a quick and profitable transaction.

The answer: There are no easy answers.

"Should we renovate the kitchen?" one reader recently asked. My answer is that I do not recommend extensive and expensive renovation projects in the hope of getting a higher price, and I wouldn't waste a lot of money and time on something that the next buyers might not want.

Kitchens do sell houses, no question about it, but I'd suggest checking out what the kitchens of houses listed for sale in the same price range as yours look like before I did anything.

I live in a community in which kitchens appear to have an afterthought. Most of the houses are one and two story bungalows, with more space devoted to the living room and dining room than the kitchen.

When we were looking at houses in anticipation of moving from the city, virtual tours on real estate websites were just growing in popularity. My wife checked out the ones visible online and found the majority had galley kitchens, and looked as if they were all built in the 1950s.

In a great number of cases, the kitchens in the virtual tours were either blurred or under-emphasized, with the focus more on hardwood floors or outdoor decks.

They weren't that great in person, either.

The kitchen that did sell us had not been added to sell but was an improvement by owners who expected to live in the house longer than the two years they got to enjoy it. For a bungalow kitchen, it is very high end and required a small addition. We estimate that it cost $60,000 in 1998 dollars.

It also is the envy of our neighbors, whose kitchens are more galley than full.

The owners who added the kitchen also renovated one in their new house. They confess that, after the trauma involved in leaving the kitchen of their dreams (job relocation), the latest one is much, much less.

What if the seller upgraded the appliances, painted, cleaned or painted the cabinet doors and drawers and replaced the hardware on them, but did not spend lots of time and money on it. The next owner can do that if he or she wishes.

More and more, the "what-if" question has concerned casinos -- as in "if a casino is built in my neighborhood, will the value of my house go up or down.

A no-brainer in Las Vegas, this question has no clear answer in just about every other municipality where a casino has been proposed. Any added value proximity to gambling might bring is determined by the attitudes toward it by the population.

If you are looking at a casino for employment and want to live close to work, then you might be willing to pay more (realizing full well that service jobs don't pay that much) for a house than what the market demands.

If you live in a high-end neighborhood on which a casino is intruding, and its presence will disrupt your life and make your neighborhood less desirable, then it will detract from the value.

In this case, nothing is a sure bet.