Make your kitchen look like new with a cabinet facelift.

Heat, water, grease and food residue can take their toll on your kitchen cabinets. And you might be surprised what a good scrubbing can do. When you're ready to clean your cabinets, have the following on hand:

Hardware (including hinges) gets greasy and dirty, too. Since you have the doors off, remove the knobs and hinges, and clean the hardware:

If you need to replace one or two pieces, take one set with you when you go to your local Lowe's. But if your cabinet hardware is older, it may be difficult to find an exact match. With all the knobs and hinges off, it's a great time to shop for new hardware. You should also take some of your old hardware along to make sure the new hardware will fit your existing doors.

Many decorative styles of hinges, knobs and pulls are available in various colors, metals and finishes:

When choosing the finish for your hardware, think about what style will look best in your home. If your style is traditional, brushed finishes, polished brass, nickel or pewter will complement your dcor. If you have a more contemporary dcor, choose finishes with an enameled or high-gloss-metal shine or theme hardware to blend with the overall look of the kitchen.

You can dress up drab cabinet doors with moulding. Applying a contrasting finish or color is a quick and inexpensive way to change the look of your kitchen. Keep the following safety tips in mind when you add moulding:

If your cabinets still don't look spectacular after cleaning, you may have to refinish or paint them. The cabinet-refinishing process is similar to the one for refinishing furniture.

Unless you're planning to take your cabinets down, there are a few extra things to remember. As you've already discovered from cleaning, working with cabinets in place on the wall can be messy and awkward. Liquid strippers work best, but use the gel or semipaste types. They won't drip as much when used on vertical surfaces. However, before you can buy the proper stripper, you'll need to find out what kind of finish is on your cabinets.

The original finish is one of several possible materials. Most of them look identical to an untrained eye. Use the chart below to determine what type of finish you have. Find an inconspicuous spot on the wood to perform the tests.

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Refinishing and Cleaning Kitchen Cabinets

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The difference between artists and architects is that architects work for clients while artists serve their own imaginations. Architects have to deal with things like gravity, zoning laws and general contractors while artists are free to ignore function altogether.

But what if architects, with all that training, all that understanding of spatial relationships, color and the way lines intersect, were unshackled by the practicality of actually having to build anything? What if they could just lay their concepts down on canvas or construct utopian places without having to worry about a construction budget?

Likely, they'd come up with the kind of work Anibal Catalan has made for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

"The Land, The Space, The Square" is an art exhibit, for sure; paintings, sculpture, an installation in the traditional sense. But it is equally rooted in architecture, the field where Catalan did his formal education.

Catalan uses acrylic paint, prints, three-dimensional constructions and video to lay out theoretical landscapes. His works look like modified plans for developments or urban redevelopments, complete with buildings, blocks and streets. Or they resemble aerial views of cities and towns, stretched, squeezed, reduced to primary forms. He employs the architect's No. 1 tool shape massing together squares, rectangles, cubes and triangles.

Artists have tapped this idea before, of course. Entire movements have been built around connecting shapes, and Catalan's work has direct references to the great Constructivists and Suprematists of the early 20th century. The whole show feels like an homage to the revolution-minded paintings of Kazimir Malevich, the greatest abstractionist Russia ever produced.

But again, Catalan leans his work toward design, and that makes his painting less abstract, more picturesque and easier to access. You don't so much have to make out images as you have to figure out what Catalan wants us to notice about them. Which buildings stand out and how do they relate to one another? How is land divided into polygons and slivers and what does that look like if you take away the people and the cars?

Like any good architect, he is all about context, presenting his works in relation to one another, and more broadly to the room and the whole museum where they are displayed. All new buildings relate to the buildings around them (at least the good ones do), and Catalan links his paintings together in similar ways.

In the museum's main gallery, his painted lines and shapes start on canvases and then run right off their edges on the walls, continuing until they smash into the next painting over. Paintings morph into murals, and then, entertainingly, into three-dimensional objects. Catalan has constructed sculptural pieces with the same shapes as his flat paintings giant, arrow-like things with quivers made of flat, metal panels which look as if the paintings manufactured themselves into some sort of industrial equipment.

Technically, you would say this is an installation, one giant piece of art filling BMoCA's main space, though you could equally call it a show of hyper-related objects that could each stand on its own. Either way, Catalan gets you thinking about the interconnectedness of our universe, how all architecture springs from the same human tendency to organize things into patterns.

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At BMoCA, Anibal Catalan dreams up his utopia

Walking around the blocks that neighbor the intersection of Fifth and Bainbridge streets, there are pretty much three answers to the question Have you heard about the hotel thats coming?

They are: What hotel?, Yeah, the yuppies are coming and Its going to be great. Despite the business deathtrap that seems to inhabit the southwest corner of the intersection (former home to Adsum, Tapestry, Coquette and a Thai place), developer Ilan Zaken sees potential in a sizable chunk of real estate across the street.

When these buildings became available, I did not initially see the opportunity for the hotel concept, Zaken said. It evolved when I saw that there was a definite need for a neighborhood-oriented boutique hotel which was intimate and reasonably priced with a good restaurant for the corner location. The remainder of the Fifth Street properties will be retail on the ground floor with apartments above.

When John C. Paul initially invested in a headquarters for his bag business, this neighborhood was drastically different. In fact, when the structure at 632 S. Fifth Street was built in 1920, the address where Paul & Sons operated a paper company for almost a century, the nearly 3,900-square-foot property likely sold for four figures. Zaken spent $2.2 million two Octobers ago and plans to convert the listless corner into an attractive mixed use site. One can imagine that when the inheritors of a dying business in Queen Village decided they didnt want to keep it alive, there was plenty of incentive to sell.

I suspect the previous owner bought the property for a few thousand dollars decades ago, Michael Hauptman, an architect and the chair of the Queen Village zoning committee, said. $2.2 million must have looked pretty good.

To some area residents and business owners, this sale and large-scale rehabilitation is a sign of the times. Ground has already been broken on the Kater Street side of the property that will house 28 hotel rooms, five luxury residential apartments, and 7,000 square feet of first floor retail space. The ideal completion date is sometime this summer, but chances are there wont be any guests, diners, or shoppers on the northwest corner of Fifth and Bainbridge streets until next spring or summer.

What about a name?

My favorite right now is Zaken Boutique Hotel, Zaken said. We are now projecting for a 2015 spring or summer opening depending on the progress of the construction. We have been working on the adjacent properties and finalizing the plans for moving forward with construction full force once we are in agreement on the final look.

The developer is no stranger to the area. Zaken opened a retail clothing store on South Street in 1989 and has been investing in property for the past 15 years. Recent projects include Center Citys Cella Luxuria, which sells high-end furniture and accessories, and the Net, 501 South St., and 609 E. Passyunk Ave.

Hauptman referenced the impending facelift the Bainbridge Green will receive and expressed confidence that the hotel will fit in quite nicely.

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Boutique hotel planned for Queen Village

Construction work is underway at the South Point retail development in McDonough despite interruptions from winter storms this winter. Rooms to Go is the next large retailer expected to open in the development. (Staff Photos: Johnny Jackson)

McDONOUGH The parking lots at the South Point retail development have been especially crowded this week. Local schools have been out for winter break and the weather has been unseasonably warm.

Shoppers throughout the Southern Crescent have flocked to South Point, which not only survived the recent recession but has managed to thrive despite the economic downturn, said developer Jim Baker, who began the project as president of Atlanta-based Baker & Lassiter Inc.

The economy is perking up, said Baker. Weve been through the toughest times.

His firm and partner retailers began transforming the property in June 2006, when construction began on the JCPenney and Khols anchor stores.

The retail center also comprises national brands such as ULTA Cosmetics, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Five Below, Hilton Garden Inn, T.J. Maxx, Toys R Us/Babies R Us, Hobby Lobby, Havertys Furniture, AT&T, Sleep Number, Party City Superstore and Vitamin Shoppe.

Construction is underway on a Rooms to Go store in the southwest corner of the development, which is about 80 percent complete through its first phase of construction.

Baker expects restaurants will follow. He said he believes there is a chance the center will add a well-regarded fast food restaurant that specializes in steak burgers and frozen custards in the coming months.

Were right now right around half a million square feet (in retail space), he said.

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McDonough retail center survives recession, continues to grow