Welcome to first gen. You sound gutsy , thats good. if you look in the Ramblings section you'll find my thread "notes from Bill V's garage"
I have lots of pictures from when we pulled the motor and cleaned just what your talking about. Our trick to cleaning, My 60 year old wife got in the empty front end and scrapped the whole thing and wiped it down. I tried to power wash it and only had marginal success.

if your going to pull the whole front end off, its a good time to change out the subframe bushing if you think they need it. My wife and I changed ours one at a time just lifting with a pry bar. with the motor out , it is doable. We didn't go crazy on paint, our's does not look like a show car motor compartment. It cleaned up real nice and is painted nice . the result, really clean driver quality. I used Bill Hirsh paint,flat black

good luck, you got lot of cleaning to do