Black end tables

Hello Peepers! I have been gone for far too long! Sorry about that. Sometimes you have to participate in soul sucking activities that consume all of your time (i.e. litigation with previous home contractor) but we wont go there! I am finally free to use my time as I please! Yippee!! "And what is it that?" you might ask.... Food & Furniture refinishing!!!
Here are my new black end tables and coffee table for the lake house basement living room. Craigslist find for $25.00 each! SCORE!

This is one of the end tables covered in mahogany lacquer (yuck!)

I stripped the legs reveling beautiful Mahogany wood (I love it!) and this is what the top looked like before stripping.

Look at how thick that lacquered layer is! Look at the wood inlay that is starting to reveal itself.

and there it is....ugly rubber edging crap! Why do they do this?
I have come to know that when ever I see Mahogany thick lacquered furniture it has 3 things.
1) real Mahogany beautiful legs 2) some other type of wood used for the top and sides 3) crap rubber edging that can only be painted.

For the first time ever I used Minwax Ebony WATERBASED stain. Oh Lord! I thought I was going nuts! Unlike oil based stains that you effortlessly apply, wait, then wipe off,  this stuff dries in like 2 minutes. This stuff you have to apply and buff off immediately. I almost started crying (cussing commenced immediately!)
 I figured if I had to strip it off again I was going to reapply more stain first to see what it would look like. To my surprise it looked great! This is what 2 coats looks like. On the second coat I rubbed it in and then immediately buffed it off to remove any leftover stain.

Here's a side by side to show you one coat vs. two coats. I love the streaks. I slightly distressed the edges and re-stained them with Minwax Provincial oil based stain.

This is the coffee table. I love the wood inlay.

Here it is with two coats of black on the bottom half.

lightly distressed with Provincial stain

The water based Ebony stain totally covered the inlay pattern (and Hubby loved the inlay), so I stripped off the water based Ebony, re-sanded, applied Minwax Oil based Ebony (which never stains black. At best dark brown).
The end table to the left has one application of the oil based Ebony stain, the one to the right has 3.

I used 2 coats of black acrylic craft paint on the rubber edging.

After 4 coats of minwax Polyurethane they're done!
Here is one of the end tables in it's forever home.
Someday.....the forever home will get finished!

What do you think?