Not sure how to choose a color, prepare a room, or clean a paintbrush? Learn some practical and unusual tips from Brian Santos, the nation’s favorite painting expert.

1.Tips for Painting Novices

Q. What are three things a novice should know about painting? Brian Santos: You might be surprised at the answer! Most of us might guess buying enough paint, priming, or prepping the walls. What do you think?

Richard Meier and partner Michael Palladino designed a four-bedroom beachfront house on the coast of Southern California for modern-art collectors. Untitled, a circa 1945 painted-metal-sheet-and-wire mobile by Alexander Calder, hangs in the living area.

Whether you want to save money, personalize your home, or just satisfy your crafting itch, these do-it-yourself projects are a great way to put your mark on your home.

1.Stylish Shelves

Learn how to make this and two other shelves for your entryway, bathroom, or bedroom. All you need are a few supplies and basic woodworking skills.

From Architectural Digest and Abrams comes Private Views: Inside the World’s Greatest Homes—a natural expression of AD’s role as the international magazine of design. Our field of focus in putting this volume together was nothing less than the entire world.

But how to choose from the best?

For Private Views, as with our magazine, it is a matter of a variety of tastes and locations, the element of discovery, the subtle and sometimes indefinable relationship a home has with its surroundings and, as always, style. The following pages offer you a brief glimpse of those qualities, exemplified by violinist Ole Bull’s Moorish summer villa in Norway, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, Catherine the Great’s Chinese Palace in St. Petersburg, a couple’s eight-story tower set amid Kenya’s wildlife and even a yurt, a traditional house for the nomadic people of Inner Mongolia.

However, those gains evaporated as futures prices for natural gas plunged this summer, including a 12 percent decline just last week, after a milder-than-expected winter allowed supplies to surge and this year’s hurricane season has so far had no impact on production. On Thursday, the most actively traded futures contract traded below $5 for 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

Note:  1,000 cubic feet of natural gas refer to one mmBtu using in futures contract of natural gas