Oven cleaning in Ottery St Mary

The lanes around Ottery hold a lot of cob and thatch, and a cob cottage kitchen has characteristics that matter on the day. Walls are thick and soft, doorways are low and narrow, windows are small so the light is poor, and floors are often flagged, quarry tiled or uneven boards.

None of that changes the cleaning. It changes the preparation. Protection goes down properly because an old floor does not wipe like vinyl, and a work light comes in because you cannot judge whether a cabinet roof is clean in a room with one small window and a range in the corner.

The cookers in these houses are frequently ranges rather than fitted ovens, which makes them half day jobs rather than two hour ones. That gets estimated from a photograph before anything is booked, so nobody is surprised by the invoice.

Post-war and modern estate housing has spread out from the historic centre, and the kitchens there are the familiar fitted arrangement: a built in single or double oven, a ceramic or gas hob, a canopy hood above it. Straightforward, level access, a driveway, and a job that finishes comfortably inside the minimum.

The oldest of that estate housing is now getting to the age where the original appliances are failing and being replaced one at a time, which produces a common local situation: a twenty year old oven next to a two year old hob. They are different jobs in the same kitchen and they are both included in the hours.

Where a hob has been replaced and the oven has not, the two are usually different technologies as well as different ages: an induction top over a fan oven from the previous decade. They are cleaned in completely different ways, one a surface job on glass and the other a strip down, and both are inside the same hours.

Ottery has a strong community life and a calendar of events that most of the town turns out for, and the practical consequence in a kitchen is batch cooking. Big trays, large quantities and the oven on for hours at a stretch put considerably more onto the cabinet roof than everyday cooking does.

It is worth timing a clean for after a heavy stretch rather than before one, which sounds obvious and is very often done the other way round. A cooker done in November and then run hard through December is a cooker that wanted doing in January.

The Otter valley holds mist and damp, and houses here stay closed through the colder months. Inside a kitchen that produces a soft film on the wall behind the hob and the underside of the extractor, which is grease that has never had a chance to dry.

It comes off easily enough once it is treated as grease rather than as marks, and the splash back and the wall around the hob are part of the job rather than an extra. What is not part of it is anything the grease has been hiding, such as paint that has already lifted, and that gets pointed out rather than papered over.