Creating and Updating Custom Lists

I have written two methods CreateList and UpdateList to create and update list accordingly. I need to use these methods while deploying the WSP to a Site Collection. Please advise whether I can call the methods in Feature activate method or is there any better solution/suggestion.

I tried creating a WSP file, but lists are missing when I deploy to a Site Collection. So, either I need to create the lists manually as a power user or deploy list using Visual Studio. For the latter the list is re-created every time deleting all the data. So have written my own methods to control the creation and update of lists.

Please advise.