Lead paint chips aren't dangerous unless you eat them...

It's been a busy, but great week. On Monday, JB and I went to the Gypsy Cafe for the monthly queer women's dinner. The food is always great, and it's BYOB so JB and I usually take a bottle of wine. The next night we met a group of friends at Tusca on the southside. We shared many, many tapas and a couple pitchers of sangria. Then we headed over to Shootz for a game of pool.

Well, JB and I are not big drinkers, so after two nights in a row, I started to fear becoming a wino, so we took a night at home to detox. We made dinner and watched a movie. I also thought I'd try to clean our stove.

When we bought the house, the stove was in pretty ugly shape - burned and stained. We cleaned it, but not with a lot of elbow grease - I guess we kind of just disinfected the top layer of burnt grease. It's a really old (and tiny) stove, so we have tried to work with it the best we can, but it's really an eyesore in our already homely kitchen. Before I really understood how expensive life is, I thought we'd be remodeling the kitchen soon after moving in, but now that I've resigned myself to the fact that this kitchen will need to serve us for several years, I thought I'd buckle down and try to take pride in our crappy appliances by giving the stove a good scrub.

As I scrubbed, some of the grime slowly came off - but in white flakes. It turns out, that the person who owned the house before us, in an attempt to make the stove look new, had painted the cooktop. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but over the next few months (or years) the paint burned and fused with dirt and food that had been spilled. So by the time we inherited it, it was horrible. I posted pictures of how it looked after several hours of scrubbing - I wish I had thought to take a before picture, because you really can't appreciate how different it looks now. The painted stove is just one of the many cheap, poorly done, corner-cutting projects we've discovered since moving into our home. It irks me so much. I really hope the paint isn't lead paint, because although I did my best to clean up all the flakes, they were all over our food preparation area.