We Didn't Start the Fire

I promise we didn't. But we would have... Who just started singing the song when you read the title? Holla 1980's!

So here's the deal. When we moved into 313, there were a few things that I briefly looked over during inspection and didn't notice that things were amiss until after we'd moved in. For example, the dishwasher tilts out if you have either drawer all the way out. Doesn't matter if it's empty.  It scared the bejeebies out of me the first time it happened! One thing that I didn't pay attention to - but wasn't really a landlord's concern - was the lack of drip pan in the oven. Dun dun dun... I was so used to my beloved drip pan at 1007 that I didn't even think to look before I prepared our yummy mini meatloaves (made in a cupcake pan) this week for dinner. Let me repeat: I love a drip pan. When they get messy, you just replace it. End of happy story.

Anyway, here's what happened this week. Saturday night meatloaf. Cue the big greasy mess I didn't know about. Monday we used the oven for a baked Mac & Cheese. I noticed a little smoke and told Chase that something must have dripped. Tuesday we had roast so no oven necessary. Today we had lasagna. I made it the night before so the hubs only had to put it in the oven to heat it up this afternoon. That's when everything got smoky. For real. All of a sudden we had nasty smoke billowing from the oven and the smoke detectors were screaming. SCREAMING. The dogs freaked out. The hubby started fanning the smoke detector with a pan. I opened doors. Mess. We ended up heating our lasagna in small pieces in the microwave which worked ok.

After we got back from our class at church, I assessed the situation and went to the only reliable source in a crisis like this...google. I read several things, but the most convincing was about homemade cleaning solutions. They suggested dampening the area and then covering it with baking soda. Let that soak for 20 minutes and then just wipe it up. Yeah. Ok. I can only tell you the rest in pictures...

Here's the before shot. Look at that mess. Yuck.

Baking soda. This is when my hopes were up.

After 20 minutes, I started to "just wipe it away" as instructed and

this is what I got. This nasty brown paste. Gag.

Then I decided to pull out the big guns and switch from the rag and hot water

(seen at the bottom of the picture) to the good ole scratchy sponge.

I wiped away the rest of the powder and then rinsed out the bowl. I noticed that the

paste wasn't coming out of the bowl so easy, so I hit it with some dawn. And wouldn't

ya know, it cleaned it up immediately. So Dawn to the rescue! Hey, if it's good for

the penguins, it's good for the oven.

Thanks to a lot of scrubbing with my booty in the air and a little help from the hubs...

We have this! All is right with the world.

If I wanted to be nit picky, I'd keep scrubbing that right side until all those little spots went away, but I can leave that for another day. It's clean enough that we shouldn't have a smoking gun oven anymore.

Hall-le-lu-yer.

Has anyone else made a huge cleaning mistake like this? That 'paste' was enough to make me gag. Have you noticed that I love the dot dot dot? ... I use it a lot...