This year I decided I wanted to  host Easter. Hence the mad dash to get the dining room in some sort of state so that it will not only look pretty, but we’ll actually have chairs to sit in.

This meant that yesterday I called in reinforcements aka Mom to help me clean up the house for guests.

{ What? Don’t you always look so glamorous when you clean?}

Our first business of order was cleaning the oven. I had never used a self-cleaning oven before. I think our old oven had that feature, but I just never did it.

So now over 2 years into using my new oven we decided to give it a try.

Oh my what a  huge disaster. First it was loads of smoke, then burning eyes, more smoke, then the carbon monoxide alarm went off and that was only 2 hours into the clean! Once the alarm went off I turned off the oven totally freaking out that I was slowly killing, me, my mom and the dogs.

In checking the internet (thank god for google) I found out that it’s common to have levels of carbon monoxide when you have a gas oven.

I thought the worst of everything was over. I went back to painting in the dining room and my helper (aka mom) went home. Well a couple of hours later I went back into the kitchen and noticed some black dust in the sink, then it was on the countertops, on the phone, etc .  All that smoke had left soot all over my mainly white kitchen. Oh and P.S. Jon was going to be home any minute.

I quickly started to clean off the surfaces only to realize then that it was also on the all of walls, in the half bathroom and oh yea once you opened the cabinets they were also full of dust along with everything inside of them.

I made a desperate call to Mom and Dad and they were over in minutes to help me get the kitchen clean before I broke down in tears.

What makes this sort of funny and prevented said tears from being shed is that this is just typical me! Things like this happen to me all the time and normally it then leads to me calling Jon and saying the words, “ Don’t be mad, but….”

It always makes me feel like I’m Lucy and he is my very forgiven husband, Ricky.

Poor Jon came home at 9pm from a long day at the office and found me standing in the sink trying to get the soot off the windows, my mom perched on stool cleaning the top of refrigerator and my dad swiffering all of the walls.

So while everyone else was watching Dancing with the stars.

You now know what I was up to! So dear readers if I still have your attention after this massive post with very little images I need help.

My house smells a massive fire! Any tricks for how to get rid of the smell before Easter Sunday?