I'm overwhelmed. . .

DH is pretty good about helping if I ask him too.

I am not sure to what extent you mean by cleaning, but I pretty much make one day a week my chore day.  This is the day I do laundry, vaccuum, pick up, fold laundry, grocery shop (I make a menu for the week with 1-2 meals that can not be eaten right away in case something changes) change sheets, dust here and there if needed etc etc.  There are other things to do but that just gets done as needed and not often enough.  Like cleaning bathrooms and mopping and dusting my house from top to bottom.  Those probably happen more when people are coming over and it hasn't been done in a little while.  I hate doing those things!
 
I do pick up things throughout the week when I feel like there is stuff everywhere.  DH seems to think the living room is also his closet b/c he leaves stuff everywhere.  
 
Right now I am feeling like everywhere I look there is tons of dog hair which tells me I need to do a top to bottom cleaning tomorrow probably...not looking foward to it!   

I like to use a handy housecleaning tool called Lowered Expectations [sm=lol.gif]....
 
More seriously, I try to keep things simple and PURGE whenever possible. If the same stuff is always lying around it might mean its "home" is not conveniently located (eg if you're always pulling out a pair of pliers from the bottom of a toolbox maybe you should keep a pair in a kitchen drawer). Don't make things harder or more time-intensive than what suits your life... so I have a file cabinet for paperwork but I also have an open filebox on the desktop to toss stuff in til I have time to file it. Periodically I throw out all the crap I never use... this means clothes, papers, near-empty bottles of lotion, whatever - if I find out later that I need it they probably sell it at Target. I'm a bit thrower-outer. I just don't have a lot of possessions.
 
And I wasn't totally kidding about lowered expectations. My mom was a compulsive housecleaning freak - cleaning and organizing ruled her life to the point that it completely dominated most of her days. The idea that I might drop a single cookie crumb on a countertop was a constant source of stress and fear when I was growing up. I just don't want to live like that... if I don't get around to the dishes for a couple of days I've discovered that life will not come to a screeching halt.[]

we pick up as we go so there isnt clutter laying around. put dishes in the dish washer as they are used rather than stacking them in the sink.

however, for what we consider major cleaning tasks like vacuuming, dusting, cleaning bathrooms, etc, we only do that once a week or sometimes once every other week.

as long as clutter is piling up, i am generally ok with the way our house looks. i cant stand when there is a pile of mail on the counter or magazines scattered about, and there are never clothes left any where except in a closet or drawer or in the hamper.

If you can afford it you could have someone come in once or twice a month and clean from top to bottom, then after that it would just be touching up.[]

I feel your pain.  Even with a good BF, when you have two jobs, four dogs, and a horse, things can get pretty messy. []
My dad used to say "just do the best you can with what you've got at any given moment".

I have a few friends who have had success with the '15 min cleaning method' - they clean for 15 mins *every* day, and thus clutter never seems to get a foothold before beign removed, yet a whole day isn't taken up with cleaning.

As for my method - it doesn't work very well. I'm going to be cleaning and sorting my room tomorrow since it's horribly messy with papers and textbooks. I'm a 'piler' - I tend to stack things until I have a chance to go thru them. [8|]

I'm lucky, my husband is retired and home all day, and he knows what a vacuum looks like, he also does the laundry and keeps the lawn mowed.
 
I clean on Friday night, I do the bathroom, the kitchen appliances and the floors, I also rotate cleaning ceiling fans and baseboards weekly so that it does not get away from me. I wash windows once a month to remove all nose and paw prints.
 
The carpet is killing me, I want to have it cleaned so bad, when we moved in the old tenant did not clean it and I didn't either since it was winter and I was working 2 jobs. Now that the pup and winter are here again I have it down for March.
 
Good luck!
Dawn

I wish I had some good advice, but I'm afraid I need some myself.  I like Erin's idea of "lowered expectations." I have this recurring fantasy about having every room totally clean and orderly. Now, what kind of fantasy is that??  My grandmother was totally organized ... she had a different day of the week for everything. She washed on Mondays (I wash when we're all out of underwear), she ironed on Tuesdays (I don't even have an iron), cleaned on Wednesdays, mended on Thursdays, etc. I'm just happy when I don't see swirls of dog hair under the dining room table.
 
Joyce

My mom uses the lowered expectations method too it seems. Actually, she uses the very low expectations method. She is a slob, and she just doesn't care. I use the method of trying not to let my things get to bad. Just clean up after myself when I am done. However, that doesn't work too well, because no one else in the house does that. So, then I try to clean up after them. Then I get pissed off of cleaning up after them and leave it a complete mess other than cleaning up after myself. Then it gets so bad I feel like I have to do something. And there you have the cycle of how our dishes get cleaned up.
I seem to like the when it gets on my nerves method actually, which gets my mom angry. I just cleaned the refrigerator, and I honestly only threw out things that were more than a few days past expiration, which was at least half of the stuff. My mom flipped out because she was sure I had gotten rid of something we were going to use. She was even more angry when I did the freezer, and I only got rid of things that were freezer burned beyond recognition, or hadn't been used in a very long time. Luckily she rarely goes in the downstairs freezer to see what I did there.
Actually, I wouldn't recommend the clean it when it gets so bad you can't take it anymore. It's completely exhausting, and you make some pretty disgusting discoveries. .

Try living with not just one, not just two, but THREE twenty year old boys. When we first got our house, I assumed I, as the only female, should keep things clean around here.
 
That got OLD. Fast.
 
So now, if it's not mine, I don't pick it up. It sits there. (Well, not dishes. I inherited this extremely anal tendancy from my mother that the dishwasher has to be loaded in a certain fashion, for example, you do not put 3-day-old frying pans in the dishwasher and complain when they don't come out clean. [:@]) But anything and everything else will wait patiently for it's owner to claim it. I suppose it is a form of Lowered Expectations....

Everyone can't be cleaning the whole house daily???

 
no, but hourly, minutely and secondly come to mind! trust me, since having child #2, spotless no longer exists, but if i slack for even a day my house will be such a disaster that i would be embarrassed to have company. it really is a never ending job, one i hate since about 5 % of all the messes i clean up are my own.
 
i tend to pick things up everytime i move or walk across the room. if im headed towards the kitchen i pick up an item that belongs there along the way, etc. because of the wee babe i spend most of my time in the living room, coincidentally it is the cleanest...my bathroom needs some serious buffing right now, but i barely get to be in there long enough to potty and shower, cleaning is the last thing on my mind when i actually get to be in there!
 
i'm home all day, but i still feel your pain.

Since I've been working, I have trouble keeping up too.  I'm out of the house for 11 hours of the day, on the road most of it and by the time I get home and get dinner going, and often finish paperwork, there isn't a whole lot of energy.
 
Weekends are the big cleaning times for me.  And typically there is only ONE day that I'm home between  errands and my Mom.  Plus, I've gotta make dog food on that day too.  DH is excellent about pitching in and getting things started upstairs while I'm downstairs cooking for the dogs.  Since we are habitual picker uppers as we go, the clutter isn't usually too bad, but I do have to MAKE myself continue to pick up as I go...there are some things that I'd rather not do so I have to discipline myself to do a little each day, tired or not.

It's tough to keep up with everything, and each person has their own standards of clean. Some people can handle clutter or whatever better then others.  I work full time, and DH works more then full-time. He will help when he is home, but also adds messiness as he will leave a coffee mug out, mail not put away, laundry started, but not finished. I try to clean as much as possible when he is not home, and relax and enjoy his company when he is home for a few days. I will second the 15 minute cleaning idea. I basically do this, it it works well for me. With 2 saints and 4 cats I MUST  vacaume every day. I own a canister vac that I really like, and try to make vacuming *fun* rather then a boring chore. As in let's see how much hair I can fill the canister with today??? It's nutty, but I have to do something so it does not suck so much.
 
Daily Chores
* Make bed
* scoop litter boxes
* vacume family room, couch and kitchen
* do dishes (always, always, always....I hate dishes in the sink)
* wipe down counters and get coffee pot ready for the next day after dishes
* sort mail (throw away junk, stack bills in drawer)
* if the bathroom gets gets funky wipe down with clorox wipes
* do a load of laundry if needed
 
The above takes me less then 30 minutes. I can whip through it in no time. For example I can vacume the house while dogs are outside eating, and usually get the dishes done before they come back in the house.
 
One day a week I deep clean the house, finish any last laundry and put clean sheets on my bed. This does not take more then a couple of hours because I keep the house neat and tidy each day. My biggest hint is do your "chores" daily as soon as you get home from work, then you can enjoy the rest of your evening, and Whatever you get out, put it away.  It makes my life easier to sort dirty laundry in baskets as I get undressed, wash dishes while cooking dinner, sort mail as soon as i come home. This way each task is smaller and more manageable instead of letting each days clutter accumulate and then trying to clean everything.
 
My last piece of advice is this quote by Lao Tzu "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." Lately I have been trying to remember that no matter what everything will get done somehow, and I need to take a few minutes each day and enjoy life.