How NOT to Care for Vintage Canisters: A Cautionary Tale of Woe

In my dream kitchen, the antique white cabinets with nickel hardware and lovely wavy glass inserts would stretch all the way to the ceiling. In my actual kitchen, they are boring builder oak, have no glass or hardware, and they stop short of the ceiling by about 15", leaving a weird empty space at the top. I've been able to use that empty space to display some of the vintage kitchen stuff I've amassed, so maybe it's a good thing that I don' t have my dream kitchen yet. The downside to the arrangement is that the items I have up there become coated with a film of grease, which then combines with dust to create a nasty sticky mess. Once in a while, far less often than I probably should, I haul things down and clean them and rearrange.

This past weekend I wanted to rearrange the items to display some of my new Jadeite bowls, which of course necessitated a thorough cleaning of what is already up there. Because I'm lazy and hate to scrub that yucky film off by hand, I decided to put a few things through the dishwasher, including two of my vintage kitchen canisters. I chose the "light wash" option with no heated dry, just to be safe. Or so I thought.

When I opened up the dishwasher to dry everything off, I found this:


and this:

ACK!! The heat from the dishwasher melted the paint off and just destroyed them. That one on the top had the cutest strawberries on it, and the other one was in really great condition with a yellow lid. And not only that, but the trap in my dishwasher was all clogged up with chunks of the paint, so I had to pick out what I could by hand.

Immediately all I could think was, well--What was I THINKING? I should have known that was a bad idea from the very beginning! I am very careful never to put my vintage Pyrex in the dishwasher because I know it ruins the finish. The vintage stuff just wasn't made to hold up to the high heat & abrasion of dishwashers today. I should have known that would be the case for the vintage canisters, but my laziness temporarily outweighed my reasoning abilities.

So, the moral of the story is that laziness doesn't pay off! You can bet I'll be scrubbing the rest of my vintage treasures by hand, no matter how grimy they are!

**Edited to add: I just found out the hard way that you should also not use 409 on vintage canisters. The lid to my darling, almost perfect condition Krispy Kan is now ruined. I think I'm going to stop now before I ruin anything else. Cleaning is overrated, anyway. Pfffftt.