Oven cleaning in Sidmouth

Sidmouth has an unusually complete Regency and early Victorian core, and most of those buildings have been divided at some point into flats and apartments. The kitchen in a converted Regency house is rarely where a kitchen was originally: it is a former bedroom or dressing room with services run into it, often on the first or second floor.

That produces tall ceilings, big windows, and a modern fitted kitchen sitting inside a room with cornice and shutters. The appliances themselves are ordinary and the work on them is ordinary. What is not ordinary is getting to them, since everything for the job goes up a staircase built for a household with servants rather than for a man carrying a soaking tray.

A good part of the housing here is used seasonally, and a second home has a distinctive cleaning pattern: intense use over a fortnight in August, a week at Christmas, then months of nothing. Grease that has been left to sit for six months behaves differently from grease that is being added to weekly, and it takes longer to shift.

The sensible timing is before the season rather than after it, so the cooker is right for the run of use rather than being dealt with once everyone has gone home. Empty property visits are straightforward: a key safe or a neighbour with a key is all it takes, and photographs of the kitchen as found and as left come as standard.

The other thing a long empty spell does is dry everything out. Grease that has sat for six months goes hard and slightly brittle rather than staying tacky, and it wants a longer soak and more time on the cabinet before it will move. It is the same work, it simply cannot be hurried, and that is why a second home is estimated on when it was last used as much as on what cooker is in it.

The town sits in a steep sided valley with Peak Hill on one side and Salcombe Hill on the other, and the residential streets climbing those slopes are steep, narrow and heavily parked. Down on the esplanade the constraint is different: loading is possible, staying is not.

None of that changes what the job costs. It changes how a morning is planned, which is why an address on a hill with no off street parking is worth flagging when the booking is made rather than discovered at half past eight.

In a lot of these conversions the extractor is a decorative canopy over the hob with a fan that vents into the room and a filter that has not been out since it was fitted. In a tall room the smell disperses and nobody notices, which is exactly why the filter ends up solid.

Taking it out and soaking it is quick and it is usually the point at which somebody realises the fan was never broken. Where a carbon cartridge is fitted behind the mesh, it gets checked and you get told what it takes, because that is a part to buy rather than something a clean can rescue.