"Alan S" > wrote in message
...
> On Fri, 8 Oct 2010 21:34:46 -0400, "Evelyn" >
> wrote:
>
>>>> I must admit I've had them for over forty years in every kitchen in
>>>> every house I've lived in (about 15 in that period) and just presumed
>>>> it as a given. Not having one would be like going back to the early
>>>> Australian days where the kitchen was a separate building to the home
>>>> so that if when it burned down you still had somewhere to sleep
>>>
>>> I've never lived where I had a hood over the stove. If what I'm making
>>> is very smelly or smokey, I open a window.
>>>
>>> PP
>>
>>
>>Bet you have to paint more often too. A range hood definitely cuts a
>>lot
>>of cooking smoke and the residue it leaves all over the walls over time.
>
> About 20 years ago I bought a thirty-year-old small bungalow as an
> investment property. It was sold under power-of-attorney by the son of
> an elderly lady who had developed dementia some years earlier and had
> finally moved to a nursing home. She had been the only occupant after
> the death of her husband some years earlier.
>
> Among the various things we discovered when we spent three weeks of
> the three days we had allocated for cleaning was the kitchen surfaces.
> The kitchen had no exhaust fan. The walls appeared to be painted a
> light tan and the ceiling a dark brown. I started washing down the
> walls with sugar soap in preparation for painting.
>
> That was how we discovered that the original colours for both walls
> and ceiling was white.

I had an old apartment with no exhaust fan. I think I lived there for 5
years. The paint was still white when I moved out except for in two spots.
One was when the stove malfunctioned, shooting a piece of hot, whatever the
burner is made of through my pan. It made a hole in the pan and shot blue
sparks up that left marks on the ceiling.

The other spot was on the wall where a very old hurricane lamp was. There
was a bit of black above the lamp where the bulb was.