I have been trying for hours to get rid of the Recordings, Timers, Timer Rules and Search from this menu but I cannot seem to find the correct elements to comment out.
If anyone knows where these live, I'd be very grateful. Please see below screenshot:
These are "nodes" in Kodi terminology. Have a look at the Node Editor add-on in the Kodi repo.
chewitt , are you sure? I installed the node editor but see no 'Recordings' or 'Timer' or anything like that 
Now that I'm not looking on a phone I can see those are in the PVR section. I would assume they are created by the pvr addon that you're using, so the place to edit will be under the add-on. The long-term challenge there will be that we push updates to add-ons and if auto-updating of add-ons is enabled (hint: it can be disabled) our changes will overwrite yours.
If they are in the PVR add-on (I'm guessing at that) it would be a matter for the developers of that PVR add-on to consider. They hang out in the Kodi forums - most add-ons have a support thread.
NB: One of these days someone needs to create a "Kiosk" skin for Kodi, or at least share the changes made. You're not the first person to come looking. Code in GitHub that can be diffed agains the original sources would be useful.
