Organizing Your Family’s Home Office Or Command Centre

Every family needs what I like to call a command centre in or near their kitchen area.  A space that is purposefully carved out to create a home base or home office to handle the piles of paper and multitude of appointments and scheduling that every busy family with children is challenged with these days.

Smaller spaces in new homes have created a big design challenge of how to get the benefits of a home office into the footprint of a smaller space. But with a little creativity, even without four walls of its own, we can still carve out space for a home office or command centre for the busy mom or dad.

It simply means designing a multifunctional space.  What better place than the kitchen for this multi-tasking challenge.  Not only is the kitchen the ground space for your culinary hub, party central, and family headquarters, but now it can work as your home office too.

Begin with your message board

First and foremost you need a create a command centre message board.  This can not only be a clever design element to your space but will also act as a place to post schedules, reminders, notices and even artwork.  This is one example of how a command centre can be presented as a creative design element in your home.

Update the information frequently so everyone gets into the habit of checking it regularly.  If you make it interesting and appealing your family will be more inclined to check it out. Clever components of ribbon, colourful tacks and a section of chalkboard will make an orderly arrangement for jotting notes and posting.

You can purchase several smaller framed boards as in this image, or you can buy one larger board and use ribbon to divide the board into quadrants, one for each family member.  And don’t forget to attach a mail sorter for stamps, correspondence and writing instruments.

Your kitchen island

Kitchen islands are one of the easiest and most versatile places to tuck a kitchen office. Carve out a drawer or shelving unit to contain your command centre essentials, slide up a streamlined stool and you have a convenient space to pay your office, store your supplies and write notes.

A little nook

If you can’t spare the space on your island, almost every kitchen has a little nook somewhere in or close to the kitchen that doesn’t have a purpose.

Reclaim it with a compact home-office design. All you need is a small desk or shelf, some shelving or cabinetry mounted above and voila! You’ve carved out some additional square footage that you didn’t even know was missing.

Locate the dead zone

What about that dead zone where the kitchen ends and the family room begins? It’s also the perfect place to incorporate a home office or command centre. This area’s often within arm’s reach of the kitchen, but removed enough so that the office will be safely out of the way.

Keep these ideas in mind as you look for space to carve out your busy families’ command centre or home office and you’ll find there is always an easy solution at hand.

If you need some help with your project, contact me for creative clutter control!