Oven’s Dirty, Time to Move

Unretouched, non-Pinterest photo of my actual oven as of today

It all started when I set out to clean the oven at our rental house. I had a joke from one of my clients: “Oven’s dirty, time to move!” I was starting to learn about “ask, don’t task” and realizing that it can be very useful to have an engineer around. I thought out how to reframe my problem of DIRTY OVEN.

1. I could ignore it - not hardly. This was basically like the inside of Hell’s Elevator.
2. I could spray it with toxic chemicals that might kill my little gray parrot.
3. I could kneel in front of it for three hours, chipping at it with eco-friendly cleanser.
4. I could trade the task off to my husband and do something else for him instead.
5. I could hire someone to do it.
6. I could ask my husband if there was an easier way to do it.

That’s what I did. I outlined the problem. I reminded him that when he helped me move out of my apartment after two years of dating, it had taken me three hours to clean the oven. I estimated how much it would probably cost to hire a cleaning service, many of which will not clean ovens just as they won’t wash windows. I believed there had to be a better way. Take off the oven door, maybe?

“Hold on,” he said.

He went out to the garage, a promising sign.

He came back out with... the cordless drill. He attached a scouring pad to it, an abrasive tool that was designed for shop use. He got some cleanser out from under the sink.

He pulled out the oven racks.

He pulled up the wooden step stool that I use to reach high kitchen shelves and he sat on it. He turned on the drill and started scouring the black volcanic mess that was our oven.

Fourteen minutes later, that oven was showroom clean.

“That should do it,” he said, and he took the drill back out to the garage.

I was still standing there with my jaw hanging open when he came back.

(Then I found a silicon oven liner for $20 and we’ve never looked back).

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time since then (2010), talking about how engineering could solve so many scutwork problems, if only someone were to bring them to the attention of an engineer. In the years since, we’ve seen various solutions hit the market, and I own some of them.

Drill attachments specifically for tough housework jobs

Power scrubbers with extension poles for jobs like scrubbing bathtubs

Window-cleaning robots in two types, suction and magnetic

A robot vacuum that picks up pet hair (but not feathers, hint hint)

A robot mop

Robot lawnmower? A joke that I made in 2010, it’s now a reality

I’m still holding out for a toilet-cleaning robot ($500, nowhere to store it) and a laundry-folding robot, once they become efficient enough to be worth the effort.

We have a joke about “starting the robots” when we leave our apartment. We spend about five minutes crating our pets, picking up the dog dishes, and checking for charger cables on the floor. Then we turn on the countertop dishwasher and the Roomba. We also used to have a washer and dryer. We would go to the movies, laughing about how robots were doing our housework and speculating on what we could delegate next.

There’s another thing that we do, something that feels like a total impossibility for most households. That is to live in a deliberately small space and own few material objects.

Sing HEY! for minimalism!

It doesn’t take us long to clean because there isn’t much to clean. You can almost reach every surface of our kitchen or bathroom by standing in one spot. We can’t keep a lot of stuff out on countertops because we don’t have much counter space. We can either preserve one square foot of countertop for cooking meals, or we could put one thing on it.

Which one thing is more valuable than the ability to prepare meals? A stand mixer? A cookie jar? A pile of junk mail?

I’ve found in my work with clutter clients that the more they wish for old-fashioned home cookin’, the more stuff they have in their kitchens, and the less they actually cook. Any professional chef would tell you that you can do it all with one good knife, a cutting board, a large bowl, a spatula, and a pan.

My people keep more than that stacked up in their sink, much less the entire room.

What crushes me about all of this is that almost all my people have a functional dishwasher. I grew up without one. In point of fact, my husband had to teach me how to load a dishwasher because I made it into my thirties without really knowing how they work. It takes four minutes to unload a clean dishwasher. Unload it once a day and spend 10 seconds put dirty dishes directly into it after each meal. It’s like a miracle! Yet you’re all out there weeping bitter tears about how much work it is. Are you kidding me with this???

The truth is that it’s entirely possible to cook nutritious, balanced meals in a microwave in under ten minutes and then spend about 90 seconds cleaning up afterward. I cannot cognitively fathom why there is so much angst over kitchen work. But then microwaves and dishwashers feel like the Star Trek future to me, and garbage disposals do, too.

So much of this is about how we internalize what we perceive as social expectations, and how we react emotionally to those expectations.

Breaking down these tasks as engineering problems is a way to distance them from the emotional landscape. Would I feel resentful and burdened about this if a robot was doing it? If it never even became a problem? The first time I shook off some blackened spilled pie filling from our $20 oven liner, I also shook off some mid-20th-century expectations. I’m ready for my 21st-century kitchen and wondering what else I can pawn off on household robots.