No more oven

The first of my field days with a 5 am start didn't go as I hoped. To start with; when I tried to go home I ended up in a horrendous traffic jam. Luckily I was in a comfortable hire vehicle with a good radio! But when I got home I decided I was going to make pizza. I tend to make it as a tray bake; the entire oven tray full of pizza dough and pizza topping. But when I switched on the oven nothing happened. It just stayed room temperature! I tend not to heat the oven in advance too much; I don't think that is very energy efficient. But it meant that by the time I realised the oven wasn't working I already had the whole pizza pretty much prepared. And how can you get an entire tray full of pizza out of the tray and into a frying pan? Pan pizza is a thing. But unbaked pizza dough is very floppy. I decided my best bet was to just put the whole tray on the hob for a bit. Only so long as to make that crust hard enough to be able to lift it out. And in essence, that worked; the crust became hard enough. But I burnt it quite severely! My house smelled of incinerated food for days.

The ex-oven

I was a bit disheartened. I was tired after my early start, and now food took a lot longer than I had hoped. It also wasn't as good as it should have been. I did manage in the days that followed to scrape the burnt bit off the pizza crust, so the pizza was not lost. But that didn't revive my oven.

I knew from Rose, the previous owner, that when I bought the house, the kitchen was about 10 years old. I suspected, though, that the oven was older than that. I assume she only meant the kitchen cupboards and suchlike. The oven didn't look a mere 10 years old! Or 15, by now. So I wasn't sure there was much of a point in trying to have it repaired. And I wasn't sure if I should; had I not better try to get something a bit more efficient? Air fryers seemed to be widely hailed alternative. Would that be something for me?

This had been my summer of working on the house; now I had an additional chore. Find out if I would be capable of repairing the oven, or have it done professionally, or either finding out it's not worth it or deciding myself I can't be bothered with it. And if the decision would fall on the side of like-for-like replacement, then the question would be whether I would be capable of removing  the old oven myself, and installing a new one, or whether I should have that done professionally. And then make it happen!

In the meantime, I have a small back-up oven. It will do the job as long as I need it to I'm sure! But it is limited. If I have five people over for dinner again, there is no way I can serve them an oven dish. But that's ok; my hob works fine. I don't know how long this will take me, but it is yet another one of those things that happens to you as a homeowner! Something breaks, and you need to decide if you can fix it yourself or not. And fixing it probably means learning from YouTube. And if not, be prepared to open your wallet…