How To Clean Between The Glass Panes On Your Oven Door

All of your kitchen gadgets deserve a good cleaning, but ovens in particular could use some love. They roast, bake, and broil everything from birthday cupcakes to Thanksgiving turkeys. These various dishes can leave drippings and sticky stains in their wake, and sometimes those even seem to spread into unexpected places. A time-to-time scrubbing or an occasional attempt at using the self-clean setting on your oven (which you might actually want to avoid, due to the possibility of dangerous fumes) fails to reach one tricky area: in between the glass panes of the oven door.

Thankfully, this zone is not completely inaccessible. Many ovens contain open slots on the underside of their door that make access between the glass easy — provided that you have a long, thin tool that will fit through these slots. There's no need to make a purchase from a hardware store, since it's more than likely the supplies you'll need to craft this cleaning tool are already in your home. Grab a long wire or yardstick, use dish soap and vinegar to create a cleaning solution, and affix paper towels (dampened with that solution) to the end of your chosen object. Then, feed this makeshift cleaning apparatus into the hard-to-reach space and get cleaning.

The tool should be thin enough to fit in between the slots and long enough to reach all corners of the glass. If you're worried about the end of your contraption coming loose, you can secure the towel to the wire with a rubber band. The solution-soaked towel on the end of the wire will then wipe effortlessly at the glass. Vinegar is a powerful and acidic cleaning agent, so it'll do most of the work for you in dissolving the grime, though the dish soap also helps, of course.

Before you start assembling the cleaning tool, though, it helps to inspect the oven door and see if the slots even exist. For a more open workspace, you'll also want to temporarily remove the drawer under the oven, then go in with the cleaning tool. Unfortunately, not all ovens are alike and, without door slots, the only way to clean in between the glass panes would be to remove and deconstruct the door. In that case, it's best to note your oven's make and model then refer to its user manual.