Refinishing Vintage Items

When is a vintage item so damaged you can alter it without guilt?  There's nothing like inviting the President to visit to get you off dead center on a decorating project!  As mentioned in an earlier posting, I decided a couple of months ago to re-do what passes for a pantry here in this one-room cabin I'm calling home.  These four open shelves (I'll show you after the re-do is complete),  created and installed by my Dad back in 1939, have always held our provisions.  When you're only here for a week or so in the summer, the mish-mash of containers and commercial packing isn't an issue.  But when you're living here and that's the first thing you see in the morning when you wake up and the last thing you see at night before you go to sleep, it starts to niggle.  I also had seen a lovely panty re-do on someone's blog and now, bad blogger etiquette, I can't find it in order to give her credit.  At any rate, it inspired me to see what I could do with these four shelves and their contents.  I like to "junque" and had some canisters and containers into which I could decant many of the items and also wanted to incorporate some antique porcelain I had found at thrift shops over the past eighteen months.  This prompted me to start painting the interior of the cabin at the worst time of year, since it's far too cold to be able to move things out onto the deck and some of the time the uninsulated walls and ceiling are too cold to paint.  So it has been a laborious process about which I'll share more in subsequent posts.  For now, I'm trying to decide whether I can paint a vintage bread box that I think has probably been here since the cabin was built.  Although it's perfectly in tune with the table and chairs (another topic!), it certainly does not go with my current decorating scheme, based on the motto I have in mind for my dream brick-and-mortar shop:  Peek-to-Peek:  Not Your Mama's Mountain Decor which is more "glitz and grit."  Here is a picture of the bread box.



You can see how damaged the front of it is.  Since my computer and Kodak printer and Kodak camera have ceased communicating and I'm waiting for Praneeth Krovi to help me solve the problem, I can't provide other views.  The top is even more badly damaged.  It didn't help that I left for a couple of months last winter, during which time the temperature dropped to minus 30F, and left one lone potato in that basket you see on top!  I've tried to find new two-shelf bread boxes on-line and at retail stores, but they don't seem to exist.  We don't use this for bread, but as spice storage, and it's really handy.  I'm thinking of painting it aluminum.  No?  

Let me know if you have ever bit the bullet and refinished a vintage item even though you knew you were ruining its "vintageness."  How did you decide?

Thanks for your input.  Teddee