Oven Window Cleaning

I finally did it! Last Tuesday at Amy's link party I read Ask Anna's post on cleaning the oven window and thought about mine.  Before showing you the embarrassing pictures, I want to say that it does not work trying to justify my laziness such as I don't like to cook, hence not cleaning the oven window as often as I should.  You see, the consequence of not cleaning it on a regular basis is the build-up I had to endure looking at every time I used the oven.  My daughter-in-law is a great oven cleaning person, she has told me in the past that she uses salt (I think with some water, too) and a razor blade to clean her oven and her oven always look clean even if the rest of her house is not.  Anna's method seemed easier and faster, so I wanted to give Anna's method a try first...

 Ahem... just close your eyes for the "before" picture...

1/2 cup of baking soda and about 3/4 cup of water.

 Stir it into a paste form.

 Cover the window with the paste.

 20 minutes later... Did not seem like they are coming off at all... 

 Maybe if I put some salt on the surface and cover it with the BS paste for another 30 minutes?

 30 minutes came and went. ur-oh, guess the baked-on has somehow sipped in between the window glass panes. Nightmare.

 Did the unthinkable.  I unscrewed the oven door cover - something I probably should not do. However, since I am some what mechanically inclined so I took the chance, snapping pictures as I go, to ensure that I would remember how to put the door back together. Guess what I found out?  The baked-on is on the outside of the window pane, not the inside! Put the door back together - took me almost 45 minutes as I was not strong enough to keep the door snap back together and locked it in place before putting the screws back on. Glad I fixed it before Robert got home from work.

 Now that I realized where the grease lay, I had but to sit down and scraped it with the little knife I have.

 A bit more salt on the wet surface and rubbed it with a half-wet paper towel and the green scrubby (gently) in a circle motion... Yes, I used paper towel for this job, as I was not sure how many clothes I would need to trash after the job.

 It worked!  Except it took a loooong time with that knife...

 Ran to the Dollar store and got these blades...

Couldn't believe my eyes.  The extremely thin razor blade picked up all the gunk I once thought was impossible. It did take some time, but I was willing because I was having a heart troubling matter in my mind that I needed to bring before the Lord, so I used that tedious labor as a time to meditate on the situation and asked the Lord to help me solve the problem.

 Wow, look at the sparkling clean oven window! As for the prayer part, the Lord had caused me to be still while He brought forth the peaceful ending of the heart wrenching struggle.  A clean oven window and a trouble free heart. You are so good to me. Thank you, Lord.


Anna's method would work, I think, if the baked-on of my oven window was not so ingrained.  But with the length of time I had left the bake-on sat, the combining process of baking soda/water and salt/razor did the trick. Thank you, Anna and Emma!

Again, before...

After.

~ This post is linked to Amy's Tuesday's AP link party
~ And Wednesday's Raising Homemaker link party