Oven cleaning in Honiton

Honiton's high street is famously uniform Georgian, rebuilt after the eighteenth century fires, and a great deal of the accommodation in the town centre is above a shop or a business. That means a kitchen up a narrow staircase from a door on a busy street, usually compact, usually with an under counter oven and a recirculating hood.

Those are straightforward jobs and they sit inside the two hour minimum. The part that takes planning is loading: the street is busy, stopping outside for long is not an option, and everything for the work goes up the stairs and back down again.

Where a property is above a trading business, the timing usually needs to suit the shop below rather than the flat above, which is easy enough to arrange when it is known in advance.

Behind the town the Blackdowns rise steeply, and the housing up there is a different proposition: farmhouses, cottages and converted barns with kitchens built around a range cooker. Some are oil fired, some are cast iron, and a fair number have been in the same house longer than the current owners.

A range is a half day and an AGA class cast iron cooker is priced by the hours it takes, because enamel, chrome lids, hotplates and ovens are four separate pieces of work rather than one. The ovens need the cooker cold, which on most models means shutting it down the night before, and in a hill farmhouse in winter that is worth planning around.

There is a good deal of holiday letting in the parishes around Honiton, and a let kitchen is its own kind of job: heavy use in short bursts by people who are not coming back, then a gap, then the same again. Fat gets baked hard rather than accumulating gently, and the grill pan is invariably the worst thing in the property.

The work is booked to a changeover window, between one party leaving and the next arriving, with the cooker back together and usable before the day ends. Several cottages on the same estate on the same morning is efficient and gets arranged that way where it is possible.

The Otter valley sits under fog for long spells in winter, and houses stay closed up for months at a time. In a kitchen where the window is not opened between October and March, the extractor is doing all the work and a blocked filter shows up as a smell that never leaves the house.

Metal mesh filters soak and come back like new. A carbon cartridge behind them does not wash, and on a hood that recirculates it is usually the actual cause of the smell rather than the mesh. Finding out which one is fitted is part of the visit.

It is also why an extractor is worth doing on the same visit as the oven rather than saving for later. The setting up has already happened, the soaking tray is out, and filters go in alongside the racks with no extra time spent on preparation.