Oven cleaning in Ide

Ide is a small conservation village in a valley below the Alphington and Exwick ridges, and its older cottages are cob and stone under thatch and slate. The kitchens in them were not designed around modern appliances; the appliances have been fitted into rooms that already existed.

In practice that means low ceilings, doorways narrower than a modern van's kit likes, uneven flagged or quarry tiled floors, and a cooker that has been shoehorned into an alcove. None of it is a problem and all of it is worth knowing in advance, because setting up in a low beamed kitchen with a stone floor is a different ten minutes from setting up in an estate house.

Sheeting matters more here too. An uneven old floor does not wipe the way a vinyl one does, so protection goes down properly before anything comes out of the oven.

Village cottages of this age often have something other than a plain electric cooker. Oil fired range cookers are common in this part of Devon, and so are cast iron cookers that have been in the same kitchen for decades. Both are handsome and both are long jobs, priced by the hours they take rather than by any fixed figure.

A cast iron cooker has to be off and cold before the ovens can be done properly, which usually means shutting it down the night before. In a cottage where the kitchen is the warm room, that is worth planning for rather than discovering on the morning. If only the enamel, the lids and the hotplates need attention, that can be worked around a cooker that is running.

The village street is narrow, it is a conservation area, and there is nowhere obvious to leave a van for two hours without being in somebody's way. Most cottages have somewhere off the road, and where they do not there is usually a spot a short walk away that works.

It helps to say which of those applies when booking. A job that starts on time because the van had somewhere to go is a job that finishes on time, and in a village this size the difference between the two is a conversation the day before rather than a problem on the day.

Soaking is what does most of the work on racks, trays and burner parts, and a soak needs properly hot water. In a modern house that is a tap. In an older village cottage on an oil boiler or an immersion, a big draw of hot water in the middle of the morning is not always there waiting.

It is easily solved by knowing about it. Water gets heated before the visit, or the tray is filled in stages, or the kettle earns its keep. What does not work is finding out at the point the racks come out, because a lukewarm soak means longer on the job and a worse result for the same hours.