Soft Black

 I don't keep many of the pieces I find at garage sales and thrift stores, they are mostly for resale.  I picked up this side table for $7 a few months ago and had no thought of keeping it.
It was a 1960's or '70's with a medium nondescript finish and these ugly leather inserts (they are actually green, I don't know why they photographed brown).
I didn't even notice when I bought it that it had all four of its brass rollers on the feet, I just knew that it was solid and I could paint it and sell it.  I was actually going to paint it an antique white with some glazing and distressing.  I think it would have been nice like that, but my husband had other ideas.

 We have an old telephone bench that we painted black last year that he thought it would go good with.  My husband cut out the leather inserts, and  I got to work sanding.  After two days of sanding (see the details on the left) I was ready to burn it, so my hubby took over.  He primed it and painted it with some black satin spray paint - and it ran all over the place.  I could tell he was done, and probably wanted to burn it also, so I took back over.  After all the work we had put in to this thing I was not going to quit now.  I took some 400 grit finishing sand paper and smoothed out most of the drips (you can still see a few, but what the heck nothing in my home is  perfect).  We had a gallon of black satin that I got at Walmart for some other projects, so I took a roller and went to town.  It was amazing the difference in the tone and finish of the gallon of paint verses the rattle cans.  This satin finish was so much softer and richer.  So after all the trouble I think it turned out pretty nice.  The only problem now is that it ended up being to big for the room we originally had planned on, but I love it where it is.