Keeping the house clean as a working mum- what am I missing???

[shreddednips]

Hoping someone can help me with some ideas for getting our house under control I work part time as a freelancer with 1 year old DS with a childminder 3-4 days a week. My DS is extremely clingy and my husband works long hours and is unbelievably messy. I'm putting my foot down over it as best I can but really that's a whole other thread.

My friends seem to have tidy houses. They seem to cope with working and housework with small children. I'm doing what feels like my best but I'm losing the battle against the constant ocean of washing up, meal preparation, hoovering, laundry....DH problem aside I feel like there's some way of managing this that I'm missing, and it really makes me feel upset, like I'm failing.

I'd be so grateful if people could share with me their tips, routines, systems, ANYTHING to help me. I'm determined to get this sorted and have systems for keeping things relatively clean and tidy (with my DH doing his bit) before DS is old enough to pick up bad habits and ideas about mummies doing all the cleaning.

Very quick tip-clean bathroom when dc are in bath. Multi tasking!

Years ago I remember Peter Walsh saying that you should "fork" everything in your house. Meaning that forks always have a place to be. You don't have forks all over your house. You have one spot for forks and everybody in the house know exactly where that is. It should be same for every other item. You should not have toys, clothes, shoes, mail, paperwork, etc all over the house. Everything should have one spot and one spot only. I took this to heart and my house is almost always clean, or at least can be in a few minutes because everybody knows where everything goes. The exception is my son's room, which is a bit of tip because we keep all his toys in his room. His room gets a really good going over every other month.

Get rid of 50% of your stuff.
Get good storage for the other 50%

I have a cleaner every other week for 3 hours. Now I can't look into your finances but mine is worth the 80+ quid a month.

It means I get to focus on the bigger jobs like sorting out.

Also we did 'chores'. Every Saturday and every Sunday DH and I used to do a task each. We would define those ourselves and they didn't always have to be big jobs either. But they were always jobs that didn't happen very often.
Examples:
Sorting and selling daughter's clothes
Giving cutlery drawer a deep clean
Throwing away all outdated medicines
Finding all the window keys in the house and attaching a keyring to them
Painting a skirting board

Because 4 such tasks would be completed over the weekend it really started to make a difference.