Kitchen strangeness!

Now that the washing machine and tumble-dryer have been moved to the utility room we have a space in the kitchen.  For reasons best known to themselves, the previous owners decided that this wall should have horizontal cladding fixed over the (probably) original vertical cladding.  The old grease splatters on the wall and cabinet sides attest to the fact that they had their cooker here ~ we had the very old cooker socket replaced last year.

They also made a cooker hood of sorts ~ well, I guess that was the general idea they were aiming for!  Basically it was chipboard covered with a sheet of copper and it looked decidedly ugly.  So down it came, to reveal.....

.....all these holes!  And yes, that is indeed daylight you can see 😕  The holes line up with the air-vent outside.  There was obviously some kind of extractor fan in place originally ~ the outer fan blades are still visible in the cavity!

I suppose it was too much like hard work to remove all the workings and make good the wall, so up went the "cooker hood".  Or perhaps they felt the holes would be good ventilation for cooking smells???

Anyhoo, Adrian has now filled the holes as best he can (he still needs to rub down the filler), which has cut down the draughts quite considerably LOL

It looks a mess right now, but we are planning to give the kitchen a bit of a spruce-up at some point this year.  It's going to be a looooong time before we can have the kitchen stripped out (like the downstairs bathroom) and refitted.  As you can see in this old post, the kitchen is not terribly attractive but it is functional.  Like the rest of the house it has suffered from years of dampness, particularly in the cabinets on this "cooker hood" side of the room.  I'm planning to revamp these cabinets and I'm still mulling over what direction to go with them.  I'll share ideas and photos in due course 😊

At the moment I can't quite decide whether to simply paint over the wallpaper on the other walls or strip if off first.  It appears that these other walls have had hardboard or plywood fitted over the original cladding.  Decisions, decisions!  I'd also quite like to have a new ceiling light fitted, one of those spotlight bars would be a good idea I think.  We currently have a single light, which isn't even in the centre of the room and is less than ideal as I'm sure you can imagine!

We don't want to be throwing more money at an interim kitchen refurbishment than we have to, but it would definitely be a more cheerful room if we can tidy it up somewhat 😉