Talk about multi-purpose!

Is anybody getting tired of me talking about how much I've been cleaning my house?

Sorry about that.  Allow me to continue anyhow.

So, I used the miracle tub cleaner, and was like "Pinterest is beautiful and works and I love it and everything on it must work!"  Well, not quite, but I was more open to trying the cleaning tips that random people posted.  So I saw one about cleaning stove grates.  Well, ours are awful.  We have a fantastic kitchen, but my mother's one regret has always been our gas stove and how it's impossible to clean.  So I saw this tip about cleaning stove grates and thought, yay!  Finally a solution.

So I carefully did what it said.  Put a grate in a zip lock bag with some ammonia.  I let it sit for a long time and and then got excited because the ammonia took on a dark color and so I was like, "it worked!"


It didn't.


I scrubbed off the grate, and some of the gunk came off, but not all.

I'd go through the whole story, of putting the grate back in the bag with fresh ammonia like four times and still not getting them clean, but it was a lot of times, and not that fun of a story.  It was irksome.

I even used my miracle tub spray, just in case.

That didn't work.

I left them in a pan on the counter, sprayed with stuff, just hoping that something would react with the spray and somehow miraculously clean them.  I truly did this.  It worked for Alexander Fleming, and we all know that penicillin is truly a miracle.  I actually announced that nobody was supposed to move them, just hoping that something would drop into the pan and magically clean them.  Turns out, you can't usually manufacture scientific miracles.  Botheration.

Finally my mother and I brainstormed and decided to use some oven cleaner.  We had some in the basement that we for some reason never use, so I figured that since a stove is basically just an oven that has the misfortune of not having an enclosure for a home, it would work the same, right?

Actually... yes!

It took some patience, due to the unfortunate build-up on the stove, but this stuff worked like a charm.  The stove grates sparkle, the stove itself sparkles, and all is clean and beautiful.  The only snag was that the bottle of oven cleaner stopped working right when half the stove was cleaned and it was sorrowful because I wanted to finish.  Why was only half the stove cleaned?  Because I was leaving some elements open so we could still cook.  Eating is an important use for stoves.  So anyhow, my dad and I took the stove cleaner outside to try to fix it, and ended up killing the bottle and spraying oven cleaner all over the grass.  Which, incidentally, died within twelve hours.

In other news, we have a new weed killer.  My dad warned against a certain patch of weeds because he'd just sprayed it.  He made a joke about using oven cleaner which I laughed at, but he was totally serious.  He went out to the store and bought oven cleaner because he wanted to kill some weeds and knew for a fact that oven cleaner was really fast-acting.

It worked.  So this was really two birds with one stone.  The stove is beautifully clean, and our weeds are dead.

So if you're looking for a way to clean your stove, and/or kill your weeds?  Feel free to use the above information liberally.