The Working Homemaker: The One Where I Cleaned My Oven

Happy Friday, Folks!

When I started this blog a couple of days ago, I shared that my muse was a gross, neglected oven. Since we put our house on the market on Tuesday, I have been in deep cleaning mode. No area is safe from the magic eraser, windex, or my new best friend- baking soda!

Today, I'm sharing how I restored my oven to almost new quality without a single chemical. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't describe myself as a "green" person. I love me some chemicals, but oven cleaner has always scared me. Besides the fumes, the stuff is hard to get completely out of the oven, so I feel like I'm seasoning all baked goods with "Easy Off."

Then along came this pin,this pin, and this pin. I figured I didn't have anything to lose. Super cheap? fume free? Let's go.

There are so many methods out there, so I did a little combo.

What you need:

Baking Soda
Water
White Vinegar (in a spray bottle)
Scrubbing pad (optional)
Plastic Spatula
Paper towels/Old rags
Small Pot (for boiling water)

Step #1 Boiling Water: Place a pot of boiling water in the oven, shut the door for 20 minutes, and let the steam do the work. Let's let the "before" picture be the one below. This was after the steam treatment, wiped out with a paper towel. It didn't do much.

Step #2: Mix baking soda and water into a paste and brush it all over the greasy areas. There are measurements in the instructions I pinned, but I just eye-balled it. Too runny? More baking soda. Too pasty? Add water. You want it to be toothpaste consistency but easy brushed on. I used a paint brush to be fancy, but you could apply it by hand if you want to.

Step #3- Close the oven and preheat for 5 minutes. Set a timer, not sure it would be safe to let the oven get much hotter. Turn it off after 5 minutes and walk away. Or in my case, go to bed! You want this to set on the oven for a couple of hours, but the longer the better. Mine sat for almost 24 hours because I had to work the next day and I wasn't about to scrub the oven first thing in the morning.

Step #4- We're ready to scrub! Use a plastic spatula to scrape the baking soda out. You'll be surprised what comes up with the baking soda. Once you've got out most of the debris, spray a few squirts of vinegar all over to break down the paste. Then, wipe clean with a rag/paper towel. You'll have to rinse out your rag several times in this process. I also busted out a scrubby sponge to buff out particularly stubborn spots. Now, you may be done after this step, unless you oven was really bad, like mine. Below is round one, and it already looks fantastic....

Step #5- Also known as the step that doesn't work. In my Pinterest research, someone suggested using a lemon with a little salt a dish soap to clean the oven glass. It did absolutely nothing except make the oven smell good. So I guess there's that.

Step #6- Repeat steps #2-4. I mixed up some more baking soda paste and applied it generously to the stubburn spots and oven glass, preheated, walked away, watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory.