Oven Demo

I've mentioned before that the couple I bought this house from had a tendency to cut corners when they purchased things for their home.  The stove I inherited from them, for instance, has been a source of constant annoyance.

It's actually a pretty good stove.  The oven works well, too, if you give it 15 more minutes to preheat after it thinks it's hit the temperature you want.  My grievance is with the self-cleaning function.

This is one of those ovens that's supposed to incinerate all extraneous material during the cleaning cycle until nothing remains but a fine gray ash.  Alas, it has a tendency instead to turn at least some of the residue into something more nearly resembling lava, which hardens after the cycle is over into little igneous rock formations.  The most annoying of these end up between the layers of the glass oven window.

I am a little OCD, and every time I've looked at the stove for the last 2 1/2 years the gunk inside the oven window has irritated the heck out of me.  I've gone so far as to consider buying a new stove, just to get rid of that dirty window.  Today, however, a minor miracle occurred.

I decided a while ago that I needed cleaning help worse than I needed cable TV, so I turned in my DVR and hired a cleaning service to come once a month.  They were here today, and one of the women offered to dismantle the oven door and clean the window.  She was ultimately unable to take it completely apart, but at least she showed me the possibility.

I guess I'd been assuming the oven door was sealed, although reason should have told me that had that been the case, the gunk from inside the oven wouldn't have ended up inside the window.  After the cleaners left, I carefully dismantled the oven door myself and cleaned both sides of all four layers of glass it contains.  This entailed using almost every cleaning compound I own, but the window is now probably cleaner than it has been since the day it was installed.

Of course, putting the thing back together again was considerably trickier than dismantling it, but I managed.  Now I'm trying to decide whether I should give up on the self-cleaning function, or just plan to take the window apart for cleaning once every year or so.

"We dream of having a clean house - but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning?" ~Marcus Buckingham