Oven cleaning in Newton Abbot

Newton Abbot was built out on the back of the Great Western works, and the result is street after street of Victorian railway era terracing, more of it than anywhere else nearby. The kitchens are at the back, they are narrow, and the cooker is usually freestanding against the party wall or fitted under a run of worktop in a later refit.

A high proportion of those houses are rented. That produces the single most consistent job type on this site: a cooker used by successive households, none of whom cleaned it properly, coming up for a check out with a date already fixed.

The two hour minimum covers most of them. Where a cooker has never once been done, it runs past that, and you get told before the day rather than at the end of it.

There are a lot of letting agents in this town and their check out reports all turn on the same items: the inside of the oven door glass, the oven floor, the racks, the hob and the extractor filter. Those are the photographs that end up in the report and they are the ones that cost people money.

Before and after photographs are taken as a matter of course and sent as files that can be forwarded. An invoice in the property address, from Hembury Contracting, is what an agent or an adjudicator wants to see alongside them. For a tenant, paying for the clean is reliably cheaper than the deduction that follows not doing it.

Away from the terraces there are substantial post-war estates and streets of inter-war semis, and the kitchens in those are larger and easier to work in. Owner occupied rather than let, for the most part, and cleaned at a sensible interval rather than in an emergency.

The modern development at Houghton Barton and Wolborough is different again: fitted eye level double ovens, induction hobs and recirculating hoods with carbon cartridges. Those clean quickly and the surprise is nearly always the filter, which in a house of a few years old has usually never been out of the hood.

The inter-war semis have one quirk worth naming: a good number still have the original larder or a fitted cupboard immediately beside the cooker, and the inside face of that cupboard door has spent decades a foot away from a hob. It is not part of the appliance and it comes up with the same degreaser while everything else is soaking.

The town sits low on the floodplain where the Teign becomes tidal and it holds mist off the estuary. Kitchens here stay damp, and a damp kitchen changes how grease behaves: it stays soft and spreads rather than drying, so it ends up on surfaces well away from the hob.

In practice that means the wall behind the cooker, the sides of the units either side and the underside of any shelf above are all part of the job rather than optional extras. Cleaning only the appliance in a room like that leaves an obvious clean patch in a greasy corner, which is not the point of the exercise.