I have three with one on the way. It’s a constant struggle to keep the place livable. Before I had children I was not a neat person and kept things livable by not doing things that made mess and staying out as much as possible. Can’t do that with kids, so what’s the trick?
If you are not a neat person it’s hard to change to one when you have kids. A few tricks that my wife and I learned.
Have smaller places for everything to go. We used the cube storage units, small bins etc. Young children’s find things by doing the toy dump. The smaller the bin the less toys are dumped. It’s amazing how much this helps. To contain the mess.
Make picking up the entire house part of the bedtime routine. It’s pointless to do it in the mornings or during the day. 10 minutes later and it’s a mess everywhere. While they pickup, you lightly clean, run the vacuum, sweep, run the dishwasher etc.
The largest issue is the deep clean. Getting all those jobs done that you just can’t get do easily with young kids underfoot. We made enough money to afford to hire a college student to deep clean once a week. It was 4 hours once a week on Saturday morning. One of us would clean with the college student while the other took the kids out to do things away from the house. We had no family nearby otherwise we would have done what my Sister-in-law did. Drop the kids off at the grandparents for a few hours while she and her husband cleaned.