Refurbishing scorched dishes!

I had been dreading this project of trying to clean up my Granny and Grandmother’s dishes that were in the attic at the time of the fire.  Not sure why I was dreading it.  Standing at the sink for hours?  Scared of the outcome?  Nasty, smelly job?  But, I decided I needed to get it done so I started Saturday and finished last night.  I had three sets to do.  The restoration company had already done some of it and had had pretty good luck with it.  But, they stopped when they couldn’t get them clean and we didn’t want to pay them to scrub our dishes. 

I tackled my Granny’s dishes first.  The before…

The after…

This set definitely cleaned up the best and the easiest.  I put Dawn, Baking Soda, and White Vinegar in the sink and let the dishes soak for a while then scrubbed them with a SOS pad and a non-scratch Scotch pad.  A lot of this set has a crackly pattern in it now like this…

 

But, I think it just gives it character!  :-) 

But, a lot of them look like this…

I am so happy!!  Aunt Barbara or Aunt Mary Helen…do you know anything about these dishes?  Where they came from?  There is no information or brand name on them.

Then, I worked on my grandmother’s dishes.  I really had two different sets that looked very similar.  Part of it goes with a set that Mom has.

The before…See that lid on the right?

Check it out now…

These were a little harder to get clean!

But, here is how they turned out…

Here’s my advice for this post.  If you are storing dishes somewhere and want to do what you can to protect them in case of a fire, wrap them in bubble wrap in a cardboard box.  Some of my granny’s dishes were wrapped in bubble wrap.  Yes, some of the bubble wrap was totally gone!  And, although it was a pain to get the bubble wrap off, it really helped save those dishes.  I think the ones with newspaper around them just fueled the fire! 

Another tidbit…If you are like me, I put most of my things in totes that I store.  I did and probably still will.  But, with that being said…the things that were in cardboard in the attic were much better off.  The plastic totes melted to whatever was in there and those items were not salvageable at all. 

Ok, enough on that!  Next post…yummy enchilada recipe!