I would use the $500 to get a professional designer to create a plan for the front yard, then you can implement it a bit at a time as funds allow. The alternative is to take the time to learn the "dos and don'ts" so that you can create a simple design yourself.

If you're determined to do it yourself, go back through the posts on this forum that discuss foundation plantings, front yards, anything that applies to your situation, and read them. Get some books from the library and study them to see how the placement of trees and shrubs is used to "frame" your house when viewed from the street, screen your view of unattractive views when looking out, provide shade, direct visitors to the front entrance, and add color in all seasons.

You can also drive around and look at other people's landscaping to see what you like and don't like, but the average homeowner, unless they have a specific interest in gardening and design or have hired a trained professional, will have lackluster landscaping at best, so beware of copying and repeating bad design.

Because trees take the longest to reach a mature size, it's often best to start there, then proceed to shrubs. Having a plan will help you avoid costly mistakes and impulse purchases, and if done by a pro, will likely save you much more than you paid for it in a few years.

Note the sun exposure in the area you're working on (which direction does the house face?) and what the soil is like. Take a trip to some good local nurseries and read the tags on the plants there. Bring a notebook and write down the names of the plants that you like, and note their mature size, sun and water requirements, leaf and flower color, fall color or winter interest, and general texture. Large leaves are generally considered a coarse texture and small leaves a fine texture, but also consider overall shape and form of the plants. Are they compact or open? Tall and skinny or short and wide? Rounded, pointy or weeping? The idea is to end up with a pleasing mix of forms and textures. You can look up plants in books or on the internet to learn more about them as well. If you look at prices, you'll see that $500 won't go very far, so plan on doing this over a period of years. Throwing something in just to have it "done" won't get you a good result, and will just waste your money.

A photo taken from farther back that shows the whole front yard and a bit of the surrounding environment will make it easier to make some suggestions. Also, the amount of sun the area gets and how moist or dry the soil is likely to be. You'll still have to do some homework and make the selections yourself in the end.

Congratulations on your soon-to-be new home.

Saypoint has said much, and said it better than I will, but since I was writing away to respond I might as well post.

I have a number of suggestions. Take them all with many grains of salt. My experience is non-professional. My input only as an attentive reader here and an avid learner in the garden.

First of all, I don't think I'd expect much from a $500 landscape allowance. I would look at other recently completed homes by this builder. I'd ask the builder what $500 might cover. I'd probably even want to know if it could be used to contract with a landscape designer  not necessarily the builder's choice  to develop a landscape plan. I'm pretty familiar with Tulsa and figure the cost of living there is slightly higher than my present location (which means it's actually fairly low). Where I am, $500 will purchase 2 nice sized ornamental trees and, if there is no charge for planting, and possibly 2 to 3 shrubs. Your builder may get wholesale pricing, which would stretch the dollars.

Second, I would recommend not thinking about plants first. Over and over again, new home owners post here and ask, "What plants should I use?" Over and over again, the pros here recommend many design steps before ever thinnking about a plant.

Think about it this way. You are moving into your home. Somebody has already planned and designed the interior layout. Thought has been put into how each room will function. You can see the builder's plans with each room identified, electrical outlets noted, doors and windows specified, closets, utilities, storage in place. It is unlikely that you will accessorize the master bedroom with kitchen curtains, dishtowels, and canisters. Because there is a house plan, you know where the kitchen things go. You will put your great aunt's antique dining table in the dining room. If you've always hated that table, it's still the dining room.

Most of us are good at identifying interior rooms. We don't need to look at a plan to know that this door leads to a closet and that one is the bathroom. We can see at a glance how a spare bedroom might function nicely as a home office. But  all that came about in the interior of the home followed a plan, a design, long before you moved in and began to think about the furniture, curtains, light fixtures, and throw pillows you might like to have.

The exterior square footage of my home is approximately 3 times that of the two level interior. Because you have posted at the landscape design forum, people here may ask you, "Where is your plan for the shape and function of this exterior?"

Some resources even suggest thinking in terms of exterior "rooms":

Entry, welcome area -- What hardscape features will guide guests to your front door? Will there be a patio, stoop, deck at the entrance? A pathway to this area? Planting beds that guide the eye? Exterior lighting?

Storage, utilities -- Inside the house, doors conveniently screen closets, furnace rooms, etc. Are there exterior spaces that need screening and/or access?

Dining, entertaining -- Do you plan on eating / entertaining outside? Does your new home include a deck or patio? If not, where would it work best? Deck, stone, pavers? Would it need screening for privacy? Shade from the hot, hot Oklahoma sun?

Play areas -- Will there be children who need space to run, throw balls, dig in sand?

Additional searches to make at this forum: "new house" "clean slate".

Wellspring

Thank you both so much for your responses, they really helped! I liked the way Wellspring said to think of each part of the yard as rooms, that really helps and takes a lot of confusion away! Thanks so much!

I would like to second what saypoint and wellspring said, not as a professional landscaper or even an avid gardener but as a homeowner that was in your situation a short time ago. We recently built our house and doing the landscaping was every bit as challenging as designing our kitchen, which was the most complex room in our house. We hired a professional to do a plan for us, but unfortunately she bailed on us after doing a preliminary plan. However, even though it was preliminary, it was light years beyond what I could have done. The plan cost us $400, which I considered to be money well spent. If you want an idea of what the plan looked like, go here: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/design/msg0623022121666.html

I do not think a $500 landscape allowance will get you much. The one Japanese maple we bought for the front, which is about an inch in diameter, cost us $250. We have about .4 acres of property and we have spent $12,000 to date, which does not include the hardscape, rockery (which we hunted for ourselves) or the majority of the back area that slopes down to the lake. It does include the bark and gravel (for the paths) though.

Because we could not call or confer with our landscape designer, we had to do our own research not only about plants but about landscape design. We probably spent between 100 to 200 hours since March reading and researching. This forum and the generous people who frequent it were amazingly helpful. However, in the end it was up to us to make the correct decisions. Here are some things we found helpful that have not already been mentioned.

1. All of this can be very overwhelming if you try to take it all on at once. So pace yourself. Start with some of the basics. For example, you need to know what USDA zone you are in because that is key to what you can plant. If you don't know what this means, go to: http://www.backyardgardener.com/zone/

2. Because we did not have a designer onsite with us, we hired a landscaper that worked with a local nursery. He was a godsend. He was able to make many useful suggestions, including substituting plants for ones on the design that were not workable. For example, there were some plants on the plan that were very high maintenance or did not work with our soil or that I didnt want because they were completely overdone in our neighborhood (like Arbor vitae). The one drawback was that we had to buy plants that this nursery stocked if we wanted them to be guaranteed. Of course, we were free to buy and plant whatever we wanted, but if they died the nursery would not replace it.

3. It is critical to understand landscape design principles, which are similar to the principles of decorating your house. Without this foundation, it is very difficult to achieve a nice look with your plant selections. There are many resources for this, but one book we liked was Ann Lovejoy's Organic Garden Design School. There are many threads in this forum on design. What we learned is that a successful candidate for your yard needs to be correctly zoned; have the appropriate color, texture, and look that you are after; met the appropriate light or shade parameters of where it is planted; fit into the space you are putting it once it is mature; match the type of soil you are putting it in; should provide interest in as many seasons as possible; should play nice with the other plants in your garden; should compliment the other plants near it; and should met your maintenance requirements (high, medium, or low maintenance).

4. You should assess your landscape first for the hardscape needs (walkways, patios, etc.) before you start planting. If this house is being newly built, you may want to talk to your contractor about this. Once you put in your landscaping, it may be impossible to get heavy equipment into the appropriate areas.

5. A plant database website is helpful for finding out more about the plants you are considering. Here is one that I like, even though it has a limited selection of plants to choose from: http://www.hort.uconn.edu/plants/a/a.html

6. You need to consider a couple of other criteria. One is how much water a plant needs. Since we are in Central WA, we tried to choose as many plants as possible that were drought tolerant. Choosing plants that work well with your local ecology makes good financial and pragmatic sense. The second thing to educate yourself about is the potential invasiveness of a plant in order to avoid a very nasty experience. Here is one example of a site that helps with this: http://www.easywildflowers.com/invasive.htm

Your state probably has a site like this one for WA: http://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weed_list/weed_list.htm

Good luck!

I just got emailed the new P. Allen Smith newsletter. One of the articles was of a saltbox type house, built very similarly to yours, with no landscaping and he has a very detailed list of suggestions as to how to landscape it. You might want to check this out.

I would like to add some other considerations, Kellmark. How much time does your family have available to it to spend on landscape maintenance? If your time is limited to 1 or 2 weekends per month (like most of us), you may want to minimize the number and size of your beds.

Also, if you don't have an underground irrigation system, you might want to decide now, before you landscape, as to whether or not you want one. Better to install an irrigation system before rather than after you have finished your landscaping.

The picture is rather dark, so it is hard to see what covers the ground. Five hundred dollars will not go far at all, so the first most important thing is to make sure that the site is stabilized in terms of wind and water erosion. That should be done before the $500 landscape allowance, but I would recommend adding to that stability with that $500 rather than buying one or two trees or five or six shrubs. Make sure that the site is seeded or otherwise has some kind of succesful lawn or ground cover treatment. It wouldbe a shame to have a nice tree while you soil blows away or the site becomes a big weed patch.

A professional plan will do you no good if you have an unstable site while you wait to implement the plan.