I think the first step is the entry. How will visitors approach the house? Is there a street behind the photographer? Is there a driveway to the right of the picture? Is the builder going to put in the walkway to the front door? If so I would make sure to get it right before he creates the standard narrow pathway sidewalk that parallels the front of the house, makes an unimpressive entrance to your impressive new home, and creates tiny unusable planting areas in front of it. Get the big permanent things done right the first time. If you provide a plot view of your home I'm sure some of the people on this forum can make sure you get the entry right for the start of your landscape.

A designer would certainly help!! Not a "landscape company" but an experienced landscape or garden designer. A good one will develop a plan for you according to your specifications and requirements, not to feed their ego or to sell a bunch of fussy plants. Unless you are an experienced gardener and know your plants, a designer can eliminate a lot of expensive trial and error. I agree the entry, including walkway and plantings, is an important first step. So is tree placement.

fwiw, unless you start out with very small plants, trees and shrubs do tend to be somewhat pricey, as you are paying for age and an investment for long lived, permanent plants.

We are blank slate at this point. My husband does concrete/brick work so he is going to put in sidewalks where I tell him to. He is not at all creative. I was thinking small curves in the sidewalk but I don't really where. Our driveway is gravel and has somewhat of a curve to it.

We are on 2.5 acres with future neighbors going to be on the sides of us, we approx. 400 feet off of the road.

Here are some more photos....

We would appreciate any guidance we can get.

I agree with all the advice given so far by my colleagues.

In order to help work out a walk to the entrance, you'd need to provide, as Kentc mentioned, a PLAN view of some sort that shows the footprint of your house and drive on the property. (The aerial view is not a suitable substitute.) It could be from some of your construction documents, or you could draw it. It must be to a measured scale. I'm including an example at the bottom of the picture so you can see roughly what we're talking about.

Since you've offered a picture that includes just the house and what's in front of it, I'm presuming it is the FOUNDATION PLANTING that your are concerned with in this thread ...? Even if that's the case, you need to also show space at the ends of the house. A landscape wraps around the house in order to create its setting. Even if we're dealing with just the front of the house, the front landscaping will extend beyond the house ends. In addition, your picture was taken from quite far away ... so far in fact that we can't see enough detail of the space to be planted. Below is an illustration that explains roughly where you should stand to take pictures of the front of the house ... about on the red spot that I've placed in the picture where you are lined up with the center of the scene you are photographing. When you move closer in like that, obviously, you cannot capture all the house and space at the ends in a single picture. Simply pivot the camera, shooting from right to left capturing slightly overlapping pictures. Do not move the camera location between pictures or it will totally mess up re-assembly of the pictures. Do not make a panorama out of them because it will shrink all the detail. If you provide good pictures, it will make your property more easily understood by us, and act as a vehicle for providing feedback to you.

Thanks for all of the replies, I will work on better pictures when the storm passes thru our area. We are mainly concerned about getting the sidewalk in and landscaping around the front and sides of our home to start out with then we will work on the other areas of our land after the final dirt work is finished out back.