Excellent advice, BigV!

Afraid of fire or leaving your door unlocked, or the light on after you leave for work? Do as my sis-in-law and take a picture on your phone, each morning, of everything you turn off, unplug, lock, ect. So when you flip out later in the day, "OMG did I turn off the gas heater!???" Pull out your phone and take a look.
When my sis-in-law showed me her "method" the other night, and I nearly died laughing. I thought I would never meet someone more paranoid than my mother...I was wrong. I love that girl though, she is very amusing.

Anyway, my bit of thread drift is done.

How does she establish that the pictures are today's pictures, not yesterdays?

She takes the pictures showing her panties, so she can check one against the other later.

Seriously, Cloud. My Mum is terrified of fire, but that at least means we're well prepared, Two smoke alarms (one on each floor) and one fire extinguisher. All of us know our escape route from upstairs (although I question whether I would be able to get out of the same windowframe we practised on when I was 16! The key is always kept in the back door overnight, to make it easier to get out in the dark/ smoke.

It's a bit OCD, but as Glatt says, the planning would be worth all the money in the world if it saved a life.

sounds like my kind of girl ;)

Is the cooker free-standing so you could tilt it up and see if there's anything underneath?

ours is back right

then its as unique as you are monster :D

Yea, we have three fire exstinguishers in our house. One under the kitchen sink, a larger one in the garage, a small one mounted on the wall in the utility room. In the last two houses we have lived in a fire exstinguisher has been used to put out small stove fires twice. A cheap investment that has payed off in our house.

Well yeah...you're British. :)

I had the mouse problem a few years back. After several futile attempts, ( including taking the damn thing completely apart, cleaning, reassembling) and several cycles off self clean, I still had a faint smell of hot mouse musk/piss/droppings/scorched flesh/yuk, etc. I finally gave up and bought a new stove.

My husband once had to clean dead possum out of the back of our clothes dryer, yuck! The smell affected our clothes for about a week before it went away. On the topic of ovens, ours is gas, and the oven fills with gas before the pilot lights it, scary.

My old oven used to always get fat splashes on the element which meant it almost always smoked and smelled bad when it was first turned on. Thank goodness we have a bigger oven now and that's not such an issue.

The only advice I'd have is to simply leave it turned on high until the smoke and smell stops and ventilate the house while you do so.

The left rear burner is probably the oven vent. There may be residue from the cleaning product your hired help used on the oven. Mine(GE) is specific about what cleaning products to use and not use. Not likely to burst into flames but I'd open the windows and try not to breath the smoke.

The mice probably built all sorts of lovely nests in your oven's insulation... I have a friend who recently had this problem with rats. Turns out you can open the whole thing up from the top and replace the insulation... otherwise, you may never be able to get rid of the stink.

This actually varies by oven. Some are poorly designed and hard to service. My current Maytag, for example. Not one of the panels can simply be removed. You have to remove all sorts of bolted on crap before you can get to the panels.