If you have a blank wall near the door your family actually uses every day, it may be the perfect spot for a simple family command center. I’m sharing how we turned our narrow garage entry into a colorful, hardworking organization zone with shallow wall-mounted storage, spots for everyday essentials, mail, and reminders, plus a few decorative touches just for fun. I’ll also walk you through the simple “zone” system that makes the whole setup work for our family.
The Before
There was a wall in our house that we walked past approximately 47 times a day, but it had almost no function or purpose. It was especially ridiculous because it was right inside the door we use to enter and leave our house.
I'm not talking about the space near our actual front door that we hardly ever use. Like many of you, we enter and leave through our garage. In our home, the door to the garage opens to a narrow hallway that leads to our kitchen.
Now, we do have a mudroom off the hallway, which is GREAT for keeping our shoes and hanging our jackets and backpacks. But our mudroom is not set up to be a functional drop zone for smaller everyday things like wallets, AirPods, sunglasses, and dog stuff.
Let me explain...
I would argue that the biggest design flaw that was missed by the original builders of this house is that you can't walk into the mudroom when the door to the garage is open. The door to the garage literally blocks the opening to the mudroom.
So when you walk in holding things in your hands, you can't conveniently drop them in the mudroom even if you wanted to. The result is that our mudroom is used more as a room where we put away shoes, jackets, and backpacks after we have settled in and shut the door to the garage.
Long story short, when we walked into our house, we walked past the mudroom (because, as mentioned above, the door blocks the mudroom entrance when it's open), past the pretty useless wall, and into our kitchen, where we would drop whatever we had in our hands on the kitchen countertop.
Can you relate?
Ugh. I don't know about you, but I cannot stand having a bunch of clutter on our kitchen counters, especially after our big kitchen renovation a couple of years ago!
Bottom line... That wall was sitting in what should be one of the hardest-working spots in our entire house.
So we finally decided it was time to put it to work and create a family command center/drop zone area that could help organize all the little things we were constantly grabbing, dropping, losing, and looking for.
But we faced a big challenge.
We Had Almost No Space to Work With
There was absolutely no room in our narrow hallway for a deep cabinet, console table, bench, or anything else that would stick out very far from the wall.
A lot of the beautiful family mudrooms and entryway benches out there were designed for spaces approximately the size of my first apartment.
We did not have that. We had a wall in a narrow hallway.
So the most important requirement for our small entryway command center was simple: Everything needed to be shallow.
We wanted to create storage without making the walkway feel cramped or giving everyone in our family a new piece of furniture to run into.
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We Built a Shallow Wall-Mounted Cabinet
After looking for something ready-made, we realized that finding a cabinet with the exact dimensions we needed was going to be nearly impossible.
So we designed and built one ourselves. I'm not going to give you a full DIY tutorial on how we built this cabinet because the exact dimensions we used are so specific to our space, but for those of you who are curious, I've included an overview of how we made it and the materials we used toward the bottom of this post.
Our DIY wall-mounted cabinet is shallow enough that it doesn’t interfere with the walkway, but it still gives us useful storage for all the little things that tend to create clutter near the door.
And because I have never met a functional project that couldn’t benefit from some color, we added this colorful, striped wallpaper behind it.
If I’m going to stare at an organizational system every day, I want it to make me happy.
No Beige Here rules still apply, even to mail storage 😉
Our family command center/drop zone sources are linked here.
Then We Gave Everything a Specific Job
The biggest thing I’ve learned about creating a family command center is that adding storage isn’t enough.
If you just add a bunch of baskets, hooks, and shelves without deciding exactly what each one is supposed to hold, they eventually become cute junk collectors.
Instead, I like to think about how we actually move through the space.
What do we need as we’re walking out the door?
What do we need to put away as soon as we come home?
What needs to be visible so we don’t forget about it?
Once we thought about those questions, the different zones of our entryway command center became pretty obvious.
Grab-and-Go Closed Storage
At the bottom of the cabinet, we added tip-out doors with plastic storage bins attached to the inside.
These are perfect for the things we regularly need to grab as we walk out the door.
For us, that means things like our dogs' yard collars (we have an underground fence for them), their treats and brushes.
Before we created this system, those things usually landed on our kitchen countertop. Now we can open the cabinet, grab what we need, and head outside without searching for anything or cluttering our kitchen counter.
That might sound like a tiny improvement, but those are exactly the frustrations we were trying to solve. So to us, it is a huge improvement.
An Open Shelf for Everyday Essentials
The main shelf holds the things we reach for constantly, including our keys, sunglasses, wallet, AirPods, etc.
Again, none of this is groundbreaking organizational science.
But giving everyday essentials a dedicated home in this drop zone means we aren’t searching for them when we are in a hurry or cluttering our countertops with them.
A Family Communication Center
We also wanted this area to help control the paper clutter that naturally enters the house every day.
This acrylic file organizer gives us a place for mail and papers instead of allowing them to immediately take up residence on the kitchen counter.
Next to it, we added a clear acrylic memo board for notes and reminders. I love having a spot to write important information in such a visible spot. The fact that we walk past it constantly means it's hard to ignore.
That’s one reason I think a wall-mounted family command center can be so useful. It turns an area you naturally see throughout the day into a place that helps your household stay organized.
We Didn't Forget a Shared Family Calendar
I wish we had room for a calendar in our drop zone cabinet, but with the alarm panel and light switches, we felt like we didn't have space for it.
But as I shared in my Family Command Center Ideas & Shared Calendar Tips post, we use a small, single-use rainbow calendar for our family calendar. We hang three months at a time on our refrigerator. As as you can see, it's just around the corner and is impossible to miss.
Pictured above: Single-Use Small Rainbow Wall Calendar | 8.5 x 11 inches | Undated
And Then There’s the Completely Impractical But Pretty Part
We have 10-foot ceilings, so the upper shelves are too high to be particularly useful for everyday storage.
So I didn’t try to make them super useful. They hold colorful decorative pieces instead. Although to my credit, we are using the cute animal planters to hold our chalk markers, dry-erase markers and pens :)
Not every square inch of an organizational system has to maximize productivity. Sometimes the thing that makes a space enjoyable to use is simply making it look like you.
In this command center, the practical stuff lives where we can easily reach it.
The colorful, happy stuff lives up top where nobody can turn it into a junk pile.
Honestly, this may be the most foolproof part of the entire system.
How to Create a Command Center in a Small Space
I hope you see that you definitely don’t need a huge mudroom or dedicated room to create a useful family organization station.
If you’re working with a narrow hallway, small entryway, or unused wall, start by thinking about what creates friction in that particular spot.
Maybe your family is always looking for keys.
Maybe backpacks end up on the floor.
Maybe paperwork covers the kitchen counter.
Maybe nobody can remember where they left their sunglasses despite owning roughly 14 pairs.
Your command center doesn’t need every organizing feature you’ve ever seen on Pinterest.
It just needs to solve your problems.
Look for shallow wall-mounted storage, use vertical space whenever possible, and put the things you grab most often within easy reach.
Then, once the practical pieces are handled, make it pretty.
Because functional spaces are even better when you actually enjoy looking at them.
An Overview of How We Made the Shallow Wall Cabinet
Our cabinet is only 5 inches deep. We used 3/4" plywood to make the frame, shelves, doors and even the french cleat that we hung the cabinet with (made of two matching 45-degree beveled strips).
To give the edges a nice, finished look, we used edge banding. And we painted the entire cabinet using Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel in the color Accessible Beige to match the cabinets in our kitchen. It's a high-quality paint that's very durable (we've used it on many of our DIY projects over the years).
There is no back panel on the cabinet–we didn't want to add any bulk or depth to it with a back panel. You can see what I mean in this photo of us lifting it into place after it was painted and we hung the striped wallpaper .
We used these soft-close hinges (4 per door) to attach the doors and make them tip out. Then we attached these inexpensive clear bins to the door using command picture hanging strips. The bins are perfect for holding our dogs' yard collars, brushes, treats, etc. And most importantly, they were shallow enough to fit in the cabinet!
To keep the doors from tipping out too far, we used 1/16th galvanized wire rope + aluminum ferrules to attach one side of each door to the frame of the cabinet. It's not fancy, but it works great!
Our Family Command Center Made an Useless Wall Very Useful
This project didn’t add square footage to our house. It simply took a blank wall in a space we already used constantly and made it work much harder for our family.
And sometimes that’s the best kind of home organization project.
You don’t need more space. You just need the space you already have to do a better job.
