Ray,

Cool picture. How large is your clearing?

I've been staring at this for a while and have no idea what's wrong. I probably would have made the space irregular--gotten rid of the straight lines to make it feel more like a natural meadow in the woods than a clearcut, but I have to admit to cluelessness about what the problem might be.

"things can and do go wrong. "

Enlighten us please as to what went wrong!
Did they clear out too much?
Are the straight lines the error?

Like rwiegand, I would prefer irregularity, and I wold prefer less clearcut. But, what did YOU want?

The builder had a nice drawing of a clearing oriented square to the road with a winding drive that would make it impossible to see the house from the road.

Instead, we got a diamond (a nice one at that) and a driveway that looks straight at the road.

I had not considered that irregular could be pretty though slightly challenging to fence.

We cleared about .9 acres of our 5. Thanks to "I'll eyeball it" dozer guy, we will probably clear closer to 1.5 and be really happy with it.

How did you manage to get the photo?

Live the "I'll eyeball it" dozer guys - lol

Can you have them redo the driveway part? They/you would have to replant some trees to get your privacy back, but that privacy would be really important to me.

If you don't mind saying, what state is this? We have lots of trees in our area and none of them grow in rows like yours seem to....

Looks coastal - FL maybe? Definitely sandy, and those are the sorts of areas where trees are grown as crops (paper, etc), thus the rows.

NW Florida. Former paper company land.

I'm a pilot so I knew it could be done. Found a local company and it was inexpensive for what we got. I would have done it if I was in the country.

We are going to work a circle driveway and then do some privacy plantings.

I am building in NWFL also... Just don't have that much land (only 1/2 acre).

It is a good time and place to build!