Your post is a little old, but hopefully you're still considering home birth and this will be helpful.
It can be messy, depending on how and where you give birth, but it doesn't have to be difficult to clean up. If you're having a water birth, well, you'll be in the pool and a lot of the mess will just end up in there. You get a submersible pump, pump out the water, and then lift the liner out and dispose of it. If you do this before the midwives leave, they'll likely take the liner in their biowaste bags back to the hospital to be incinerated. They usually won't take down the pool, unless they are an IM, but they can take the waste from it, if you want. If you're having a dry land birth or for when you get out of the pool, some sort of floor/bed/sofa covering is good. Most people use shower curtains or a tarpulin or some other waterproof sheeting, often covering by blankets or towels just because it's more comfortable. Then you just wrap it all up after and dispose of it (midwives will take it if you do it before they leave). You can also wash things you don't want to dispose of, but most people get old towels and blankets that they are happy to just throw away. I got a load of cheap towels and shower curtains from Argos.
I personally had nothing under me at all besides a maternity mat that the midwives somehow managed to slide under at the last minute. I'd planned to have a water birth and give birth downstairs, but I got out and went upstairs and no one brought any of the floor coverings up behind me. So I literally just had a thin pad about 24in square between me and my carpet!
It did leave a big blood stain on the carpet (about 18 in in diameter), but my husband dumped a big load of salt (like a 2inch deep pile) and let it soak for a few hours and then scrubbed it up with Vanish carpet cleaner. It was as good as new and you would never know someone gave birth directly onto our pale blue carpet! It's best to get some floor coverings and make sure it's someone's job to actually use them, but even if you don't, the mess cleans up fine. After that, I got on the bed to deliver the placenta and have a cuddle. We put another bed mat down and then to clean that up, the midwives removed the bed mat and the sheets which has some stains on them just got washed on cold and they were fine. Anything else that was messy, like towels or things, just went in the bin. The midwives will help tidy up some of the biowaste or things that are bloody, etc. to take back to the hospital with them (it isn't supposed to go out in the normal rubbish, in theory), but they won't like clean for you. But if you just don't give birth in the middle of the carpet like I did, there isn't much to clean up, so something your partner or a family member could come over after and do.
Midwives at home are able to handle just about everything that doesn't need surgical intervention. So they can recusitate a baby at home (and also you, they carry oxygen and a whole kit for all of that). They can deal with a PPH. And generally speaking, anything they wouldn't do at home, they can stablise you both enough to be transferred, for example, for a retained placenta. I had a nearly retained placenta and midwives were great. It took some time, but everyone was calm and they got me sorted in the end. I still wouldn't have wanted to be in hospital just for that though. They do all the after birth checks, like Apgar scores and length/weight/head circumference, and such. They don't do the newborn checks like for hip dysplasia or the hearing test (these are the sort of things you usually do before you leave hospital or at your GP, not right after birth anyway). So you'll have to go into hospital or to your surgery to have them done usually, though I have heard of GPs making home visits to do some of them. They aren't usually done until a couple days after birth anyway, so you might not even be in hospital if you had a hospital birth and might still need to get in the car and go somewhere.
The midwives will stay usually for a couple hours after the birth just helping with feeding, getting all their equipment together, finishing up their notes, etc. And then just like with any other birth, they check in with you every day for the first few days, do more checks, weight baby, answer questions, etc.
