Oven cleaning in Kenton

Kenton sits above the tidal flats on the western shore of the Exe with Powderham deer park on one side, and its housing is unusual: thatched and slate roofed cob cottages along the main street, red sandstone estate housing tied to the castle, and later detached houses on the lanes running down to the water.

The estate cottages in particular have kitchens that were fitted into rooms with thick walls, small windows and low ceilings. Nothing about the cleaning changes, but everything about the setting up does. Floors are often flagged or quarry tiled and uneven, and protection goes down properly before a single rack comes out.

This is proper range cooker country. Plenty of houses in and around the village run an oil fired range as the main cooker and the main source of kitchen heat, and a fair few have had the same one for twenty years or more.

A range is a half day of work at least, because it is two ovens, a grill and a wide hob rather than one cavity. On a cast iron model the ovens want the cooker cold, which means shutting it down the night before, and that is a real decision in a cottage where the kitchen is the warm room. Where only the enamel, lids and hotplates need attention, that can be done with the cooker running and it is a much shorter visit.

The lanes off the main street are narrow with high banks and few passing places, and several properties sit at the end of a track. Most have somewhere to pull in and the ones that do not usually have a field gate or a yard nearby that works.

None of it is a problem when it is known in advance. It becomes one when a van arrives at a single track lane with nowhere to stop and a customer who assumed it would be obvious. One sentence in the booking prevents it entirely.

The village is open to the estuary and takes salt-laden south westerlies straight up the water, so stainless in these kitchens picks up the same dull bloom found in Topsham and Exmouth. Behind the village, the inland side is sheltered and warms early.

What is more noticeable here than the salt is the interval. Rural properties tend to go longer between cleans simply because there is nobody local doing this work regularly, and a cooker that has run for three or four years untouched is a longer job than one done annually. That is priced by the hours it takes and estimated from a photograph before anything is agreed, with no optimistic rounding down.

Longer intervals also change what the visit is for. On a range that has been running untouched for years, the first clean is as much about finding out what state the cooker is actually in as it is about the finish: worn door ropes, a burner that has stopped lighting evenly, a hotplate that has never been worked back. Those get pointed out with a plain view on whether they matter.