Pesky magnets for every spare scrap and belonging that doesn’t quite belong (but can’t be thrown away, either), your basement and garage may spite your cleaning efforts year after year. Rest assured, however, they can be tamed…one way or another. Here are five of the most useful strategies to finally create and MAINTAIN an organized basement or garage space.

1. Flexible Cabinets and Storage Units—It sounds so simple: Your basement or garage is overrun with random items that have no assigned place. You need more storage, right? Probably…but the answer is often more complicated. You can’t just inundate a space with a bunch of cabinets or storage units, throw everything in, and call it a day. For one thing, the cabinets may be their own eyesore without some kind of plan or design. For another, you may never be able to find anything in those cabinets ever again. Go too large and your storage units become an abyss of unidentifiable clutter. Often, shallow or recessed cabinets are the right addition. Modular cabinets are also great to keep flexibility in both the design and overall capacity of your basement or garage storage. If you’re still having trouble assigning a place for all your clutter, maybe it’s clutter not worth saving. It may be time to have one of those self-defining moments where you make a concerted effort to curb your packrat tendencies.

2. Incentivize Your Cleaning and Organization—Bribes don’t just work on the kids: Many homeowners wish to organize their garage or basement spaces for a particular recreational purpose. Maybe you want to have more fun, be in better shape, or watch movies on a 64” screen with surround sound. But you never seem to get around to it. Well, try this: Locate your prize, find out how much it’s going to cost, and make a promise with yourself that you can splurge on this item, once you’ve organized and cleaned your basement or garage. If you like to play for high stakes, go ahead and buy the thing. Watching several hundred or thousand dollars worth of exercise equipment, billiards, home theater system, etc., sitting there waiting for a space, waiting to be used, almost judging your inaction is a nearly foolproof way to motivate yourself.

3. Free and Hired Help—Don’t go it alone: As intimidating as these spaces may appear when you start, once you’ve spent 4 hours moving, piling, sorting, and routing your clutter, you may discover that your basement or garage looks as bad or even worse than it did when you started. Without an encouragement from friends, family, or neighbors, it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to give up. Whether it’s moral or substantive support, find someone to help you out. If you’re trouble is less about the initial cleaning and more about maintaining, your answer may be to hire a professional. Designers are problem-solving whizzes when it comes to tight spaces or long-term organizational planning. Maybe you need a carpenter to come in and build you a custom cabinet or two for those awkward spaces.

4. Easy-to-Clean Flooring—Let’s face it: Your basement or garage may always serve as auxiliary storage space, naturally gravitating toward a cluttered state. Maybe you choose to simply relegate the task to annual spring-cleaning. The key is not to make any harder on yourself than you have to, and this means once you’re done straightening things up, you shouldn’t have to worry about cleaning your floor, too. If you have concrete subflooring, concrete staining will give your concrete permanent coloring that will sharp and disguise grease stains and other filthy eyesores.

5. Renovate to Resuscitate—Call in the big guns: Some basements and garages are in such a state of disrepair that it’s hard to justify simple cleaning and reorganization. If your garage door doesn’t reliably open or close anymore, if your basement is so dank that it smells more like a stale swamp than a residential space, if your garage walls are dilapidated, if your basement plumbing leaks, if your garage has no working light fixtures, you may not professional renovation, before you can reasonably clean or organize your space. Naturally, these projects aren’t cheap, but they also have plenty of benefit on the back end. Besides being able to customize the space for whatever use you have in mind, you’ll had a good chunk of change to the value of your home.