Natural Oven Cleaner – part 2

Today is Deep Cleaning Day.

A few months ago I hung up a ‘weekly cleaning schedule’, hoping it would help me on the road to being a better housekeeper. I genuinely want to keep the house up for me and my OH, since I am not working right now, I definitely have the time! But things get in the way – be it a day out at my parents’ , a walk at the dog park or another migraine, something always seems to drain my limited energy reserves before I get to the cleaning part of the activities.

While I haven’t done as well with the cleaning schedule as I had hoped, it has gotten me to thinking about cleaning more often – which was part of  the goal! Along with the regular daily chores – laundry, dishes, sweep, etc… each day has ‘vacuum’ , ‘appliance’ , dusting’ and so on. So far, each week I have done one of these things. Last week it was vacuuming the couches and rug. This week (due to cleaning the oven end of last week) is appliance day.  I have cleaned the fridge (huzzah!), the coffee pot, wiped off the blenders and the espresso machine and cleaned the oven racks.

For the oven racks, last night  I did some research last night (on pinterest of course!) and found a delightful idea that claimed to be almost effortless.

All you do is put your oven racks in the tub and cover with hot water. Add 6-8 dryer sheets. Let soak overnight. The lady I was reading from – One Good Thing by Jillie – also added some dawn dish soap to the mix. Apparently the anti static agents in the sheets break up the food from the rack and the softening agents soften the food that’s been baked on. Then, you use the dryer sheets to scrub the remaining gunk off.  Now, she left it overnight plus some, but as my OH is the first one up in the morning, I knew I couldn’t do that. So, as soon as he’d left for work, I set these to soaking. I let them soak for about 5 and a half hours. Hoping that was enough time, I started scrubbing on them.

soaking in the tub

At first, I was excited! They were coming clean! Huzzah! But then the elation wore off as I realized I had picked the one side of the rack that was the cleanest to start with…. While they are significantly cleaner than they started, it wasn’t as amazing as I had hoped. Granted, I didn’t leave them overnight and I didn’t have a scrub brush to really work at the gunk (I’ve really gotta get me one of those soon!) – but my overall rating of this Pinterest cleaning tip is a half-fail.

Half fail for me and half fail for it.

finished product

After the racks were back in the oven, I started soaking the pans (meant to have them soaking first thing in the morning! oops). But as I am out of vinegar and baking soda ( add those to the list!) I poured some lysol and laid one of my reusable cleaning wipes ( for that post, click here ) in the water just for the heck of it. While those soaked, I took a mandatory break. Once I could pry myself back off the couch, I wiped out the —what’s it called? The under-the-burner-pans-top-of-the-oven…. Always gets so dirty there. You can always tell which burner you use most – for us it’s our one large burner. Yeah, three small burners and one large. What genius thought of that??? Pbbt.

Anyway, Scrubbed all the rest of the surface of the oven. Knobs. Burners. Front. Handle that gets greasy gunky. You get the idea.

Grabbed my car wax – yes, you read that right. I told you I’d use it for cleaning the oven! Just wax the top of your stove, rub it in and rub it off and it’s supposed to make future spills come right off! I’ve never done it before so we will see if it actually works. But the top does look a lot nicer now! =)

 I scrubbed the pans – will absolutely have to give them some serious TLC next time around as they are still pretty sad – and put the oven all back together.

All Clean!

This is the cleanest the oven has been in a looong time! I hope to keep it kept up from this point on.

Happy cleaning!

~Laura

Tags: chemical free cleaners, natural oven cleaner, oven rack cleaner