Introduction

When 38-year-old Beth Lucey and her husband, Will, remodeled their 1940s house in San Francisco last year, they knocked out a closet in the kitchen and ended up with the perfect corner for the family's command center. To manage the schedules and daily paperwork of a family of four, Beth says, she installed "what we had": a butcher-block table, a set of open wire drawers, and a few file folders, plus the coffeemaker, the recycling bin, and other odds and ends that didn't fit in the rest of the little kitchen.

Things started out well enough but quickly got out of hand. The wire bins overflowed with papers from two elementary schools — the one that five-year-old Megan attends and the one where Will is principal — and the preschool where two-year-old Cooper will start this fall. Not to mention the phone books, the aluminum foil, the dish towels...With a large extended family on both sides, there were always invitations to keep track of, which too often ended up at the bottom of a drawer or in the recycling bin. Since the table was the spot where everyone deposited backpacks, coats, and other items when they got home, papers would be swept onto the floor and accidentally discarded. "I was always losing something, forgetting a date," says Beth, a stay-at-home mom. "I'm generally an organized person, but I always felt disorganized."

The solution, in this case, is all about the gear. Thanks to the right tools and two simple, inexpensive pieces of furniture, Beth now has a command center where she's fully in control. Here’s how that mission was accomplished.