hook nook plan

My house is cute. I love it, I really do. But there are...places. Areas I am less than thrilled with. My entire kitchen being one, but we can get to that story another day. Behold, the area between the kitchen and the garage, my nook of shame:

I SWEAR it was clean about a week ago. So embarrased right now. Sigh. Wanna see what the space looked like when we bought the house?

Class-say. See the wire poking out of the wall to the left of the desk? That's where a sconce was. Nice height for a sonce, wasn't it?   The problem with this area, besides the apparently ugliness and sheer amount of orangey wood, was that it was wasted on us. I thought I'd make it a cute desk area with basket storage  but then I realized I hated having my desk there, so NOW I have a new, fancy, bespangled plan of form meets function cuteness. Because I? love plans. And projects. And project plans.

Ahem:

(I originally had these plans written out directly on the photo because it looked cool. But then I heard my mother calling me to complain about how it was hard to read and how function needs to come before form or something like that, and I got scared into making the list this new way)

1. Remove cat.

2. Paint door (my entire kitchen was this color when I moved in... shudder.)

3. Remove world's ugliest light strip and put in cuter lighting from the paneled ceiling.

4. Speaking of that ceiling, paint it white to make it more cottage and less hang-a-deer-head-on-the-wall cabin.

5. Do some sort of awesome paneling (beadboard? board and batten?) and hang cute hooks on the wall across the windows.
6. Get rid of the big pile of junk desk.

And finally....

7. Storage bench in the hook nook! Brilliant, I tell you.

Don't be jealous of my photoshop skills.