It's great to read the messages from those of you who are using your Lacanches. My Cluny, in French Blue with the traditional top, is on its way to my kitchen. I can't wait to see it installed (along with the counters, cabinets, floor, etc.) I spent many hours debating the Traditional vs. Classique. We went for the Traditional for a variety of reasons. Four burners is more than enough for us. I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever had all four burners going at once, and the 15k burner will have plenty of power for us. Since we don't need five burners, we thought why not go with something that functions differently than a regular burner? My husband is excited to experiment with it and learn how to cook on it. The French Top throws off a good amount of heat, and since we are in Massachusetts that will come in handy. There are only two months a year when the heat doesn't come on in our house - July and August. Even June and September have some cool days. I can see where if you live in a warmer climate it would be a problem, but in chilly New England it will be great.

I found lots of stuff on the web about using ammonia to clean the oven -- put a bowl or pot of ammonia into a heated (though currently off) oven, leave it overnight, and in the morning simply wipe all the crud out. I did use this trick for the oven shelves -- put the shelves in a black trash bag with a cup of ammonia and leave overnight, then rinse them clean in the morning.The oven shelves looked like *new* when I took them out and washed them off. I have no doubt ammonia would have worked like a charm in the oven as well, except that after 15 minutes I was sure that we were all going to be asphyxiated in the night by the ammonia fumes, so I took the bowl out. What I ended up using was basically baking soda and vinegar and water, mixed together. Yes, you get a fizzy mess when the baking soda and vinegar mix. Once that cooled down, I coated the entire inside of the oven with the goop, as much as I possibly could. I let it stand over night. The next morning, using a sponge (frequently washed out), I wiped out the entire inside of the oven. That oven looked pretty damn good after that. Yes, elbow grease was involved, but it smelled okay (and it was immediately obvious where I hadn't wiped, because it still had white streaks). In the future: I'm going to try to get on top of spills/messes earlier (I bought a mat for the bottom of the oven now), and I'm going to use the baking soda/vinegar trick. If you want things to be really easy and you don't mind a strong smell, the ammonia is amazing. Here is a link that might be useful: Baking soda and vinegar

lwo and Angie -- oh my gosh, you've opened up a whole new can of worms! I'm actually scanning the RAL book to see if there's a salmon color. May I send you the medical bills for DH's heart attack after he sees the salmon stove? It would be so out of character and wildly fun to go that route... sayde -- I thought there might be a "Don't ask me how I know" story behind your first comment. Interesting about the non-matching browns. Did you get a metal sample first? I'm glad it ended well. If the bottle green looks too fanciful, how do you think a salmon stove would read? I'll keep you posted. chris11895 -- That's true, on this forum everyone's seen samples of everything! Here goes: the counter is a quartzite called Ocean Stone, the floor is duro design cork in Azure, the backsplash tile is the sunflower pattern in ming and thassos, and the cabinets are painted maple in Classic White. Oh, and the stove samples are, from the top down, cement gray, blue gray, and papyrus white. Any thoughts? Sorry for the double post -- server's acting wonky. This post was edited by justmakeit on Fri, Jan 25, 13 at 23:19

Hard to tell from a monitor, but aubergine is probably RAL4007. I love aubergine & wanted it for my dining room before I even knew it was color that was about to trend "hot". For a dining room, it is only paint & purple was always my Grammy's and my favorite color. But, unless y'all have loved purple from infancy, I would be careful with aubergine because it will look dated when pampelmousse is the new "hot" color (just making that up; I have no foreknowledge of color trends.) We will have cream cabinets & red oak floors. If we go with Bluestar, we're likely to do RAL5002 or slightly darker. This is because we want a black and cream granite which has a strong blue undertone so we want to bring that out. When we thought we were doing granite with garnets in it, we were going to do a deep red to pick up on the garnets. With soapstone, you probably have more flexibility. The designers on this board can chime in better than I, but what about a British Racing Green (close to RAL6005)to pull on the green that your soapstone might have? Good luck & enjoy it. I'm sure an autobody shop could repaint it if the red turns out to be a pure disaster.