Spike Carlsen: Hi, I am Spike Carlsen. I am a contributing editor for The Family Handyman magazine. It's a number one Do-It-Yourself in home improvement magazine on the planet.

Today we are going to talk about how to get a room ready for painting. One of the important things to have is the right set of tools for doing it and there is a quite a few that you need.

Your very best friend is a good painters tape. We are using broad tape today, it has a special coating on it and when it latex paint hits it; it activates it to expand the tape a little bit to create a nice clean line.

If you have pins and dents on your walls, which you surely will have you need a putty knife and some good putty to fill those holes and then you will also want a sanding block and some sand paper to sand those areas smooth once they have been patched.

You are going to be removing outlets, cable box covers, grills that type of thing. A good simple multi tip screw driver is your best tool for that. With any wood work you bound to find some nails that have worked their way out or need to be sunk a little deeper so simple nail set and a hammer are good tools for that.

You are going to run into some areas where you are just going to need a little extra fill or little extra caulk and so for that you just want a good paintable caulk, a good simple caulk gun to take care of that.

Finally, you are going to want some drop cloth. Some people prefer plastic, other people prefer canvas, I prefer both so there we have our tools. So let's get ready to paint your room.