First and foremost, accept that some degree of clutter with a child is inevitable

• Start with messes and clutter you see every day. So work on organizing your kitchen or family room before your hallway closet.
• Assign everything in your house a home. This way everyone in your family knows where to find what they need, and more importantly, they know where to put it away.You use this principle to organize your silverware, with clearly defined places for forks and knives, or drawers for socks or, underwear. Bring this thinking to the broader aspects of your home to save many hours of searching for things. It dramatically cuts down on the clutter of items left out “for now” or “until I find a place for it.”
• Make it a general policy to try to throw out one old thing for every new purchase that enters your home.
• If you have stairs, never go up or down them empty-handed. Always grab stuff with you that belongs to upstairs rooms and quickly put it away.
• Observe what things pile up in your house and where they cluster, and come up with a place nearby that becomes the official home where those things reside. Baskets, shelves, and folders work wonders for this.
• Designate a basket for you and your partner for incoming mail, bills, and receipts.
• Create working folders for discount coupons, invitations and directions, and other time-sensitive papers that clutter your counters.
• Keep frequently used items in places where you can reach them without stooping or struggling, and store them close to the place they’ll be needed.
• Purchase drawer dividers for socks, underwear, lingerie, and tiny items, to keep them separated and organized.
• Hang hooks for your keys and purse by the entry to your home, so each time you walk in, you can hang them up immediately.
• Designate one place in your house for storing library books, and end a house-wide hunt when it’s time to read or return them.
• Get rid of junk drawers, or limit yourself to just one that you clear out once a month.
• Things to get rid of:
  • Magazines you’ve been meaning to read but have never gotten around to
  • Expired medicine
  • Clothes you haven’t worn for the past two year
  • Sunscreen that’s expired or more than two years old
  • Extra paper or plastic grocery bags
  • Makeup and samples more than a year old
  • Get rid of the cookbooks that you barely use, as they take up unnecessary space. Cut out your favorite recipes first and put them in an inexpensive photo album to make one customized recipe book.
  • Organize your coupons by the month they expire so you will easily know which unused ones to toss.
  • You can stuff a dozen crumpled plastic bags from your grocery store inside a cardboard roll from the inside of paper towels for compact storage and easy access under your sink.

An excerpt from Stacy DeBroff’s The Big Clean Up