I've recently purchased a home and have made great strides to clean up the exterior. As you can see in the "before" pictures, it was quite overgrown when we bought the place. I've cleared just about everything out and you can at least see the house from the street again. My problem is that I'm at a loss as to what to go back with.
Problem 1 - the house is in a curve, when you're driving down our street, you can see inside of the carport and most of the back yard.

Problem 2 - The house exterior is bland and ordinary. Painting is in my plans but want to come up with a landscape plan prior to painting so I can coordinate colors better.

I have added a few crape myrtles along the right side of the driveway and a couple of redbuds along the left side. I also planted 2 dogwoods between me and my neighbor to the left as an attempt to cover up his parking lot of vehicles and junk he keeps in his carport (my desire is to build a 10' wall between my house and his...LOL)

We're planning on living here for quite some time so I'm not interested in breaking the bank all at once. My goal is to improve over the years and hopefully 5 to 7 years from now, we'll be the envy of the neighborhood. I know the driveway would be a huge face lift but we're probably 5 years away from that project. I'm not particularly interested in going back with raised beds across the front of the house like I removed but would love to add a walkway from the center of the house over to the driveway. I'm hoping to remove the pine tree to the left in the next few years but in the mean-time I'm planning to remove the raised bed and ground cover that's around it.

Any ideas and advice would be greatly appreciated.