You're asking an awful lot of this forum. You have a new house (very nice!) and a ton of landscaping needs to be done. If I were you I'd call a landscape arch. or designer and get a good 'Phase 1' plan. From there you could work on each area as time and budget allows.

Please take this advice remembering how much you paid for it! I'm thinking design basics here because I don't fully understand how your lot is laid out. It seems relatively narrow and quite deep but essentially a large lot.

I live in coastal South Carolina so I don't know what grows on your lovely rolling hill. Everything here is good a flat, too. But the first thing I think I'd do is walk the circumfrance of the house from the places others can see it (the road, neighbors views from windows, etc.) Hold your hands on each side of your face and give yourself more narrow views (like a horse wearing blinders). This may help you visualize the best features and most significant problems.

Then consider (and I'd do this on paper because I forget details) things like basic problems, long range development and immediate fulfillment (and, shudder, budget).

The front of the house is so very handsome, I'd hesitate to interrupt the view from the street with a fountain, beds or anything else. For example, you might want to put a stand of (ultimately) dramatic trees starting half way up the drive and put a fountain up against that. As you enter your driveway on the right of your house, you'd look across to the fountain, not see the neighbors and enjoy the view of your own house.

You need an engineer (from the city or private). They understand soils, percolation, run-off, etc. This is not a self-solving problem and it won't go away by itself.

For immediate fulfillment this year, I'd invest in some enormous pots, raise them up a bit and fill them with a single color of wave petunias and put on a show this summer. You can always find a place for them as your plans mature.

As in many new developments, these houses look lonesome, but you need some privacy. If the lot shapes allow it to make sense, I'd plant a forrest out back. Other people's garages are ugly enough neatly closed, but you can't count on them to do that the afternoon of your garden party for Aunt Sue's 80th birthday.

Finally, keep it simple, add gradually, get the slow growers (trees) in the ground now or next fall, invest in a few more mature specimens so you don't have to wait quite so long and the yard doesn't look like a new tree farm.

Personally I'd do very little out front. Daggum fine looking house from the street.

Going to this forum as any landscaper I've spoken to tells me I need "everything" and wants to charge $$$$. I would love to do a phased approach, but everyone wants half of the entire project immediately, and I don't want to do a big project, at least until I know what looks good in the yard, not what looks good in the landscaper's pocket.

Front: Neighbor did a retaining wall which looks great; what's the general opinion on them? I just wanted to do something different and I love fountains.

Wanted to stay with a color theme such as pinks, reds, whites, rather than every shade of the rainbow. Yes, no?

Side 1: We grew Italian Cypresses when I was growing up in the same area, but every nursery here tells me they won't grow in this region. We also grew Crepe Myrtles, another no-no here. These are the same nurseries that also tell me they can't get them in; so I was going to order online, and have someone plant them right next to the side.

I am baffled at what to do on the one side of the yard, which parallels the long driveway to the house in back, and divides us and our neighbor. It will be too expensive to line our side (and the driveway of the home in back) with trees going all the way to their garage. The builder put in some maples, but it will be a while before we see anything.

Back: I was going to put a screen of evergreens along the back of our property, which will go on either side of the set of mulched pines that the builder put between our property and their's, and I want a weeping willow somewhere, maybe on the back corner?