We bought a new house in Albany, Oregon back in about 2004 (picture to the left). When we bought the house it did not have anything but a small slab for a patio in the back. Grandpa Milo helped us put in a beautiful, stamped concrete patio with large planters in the back. There was no landscaping other than a small patch at the front of the house; all of the rest of it was dirt and weeds. I have to say we had a great time putting in the lawn and doing a little landscaping around the house. We planted rows of trees along both streets (it is a corner lot) and the back property line. There were some electrical services at the front of the lot that drew attention that we did not look. Since there was a very slight slope toward that corner of the lot, we put a small retaining wall around the services, built up the dirt behind the wall a little and planted some trees and plants. We also added the porch roof and decorative posts that cover the porch that leads to the lawn on two sides of the house and the French doors that lead out to the porch. lead out to the lawn from(well that was our builder Mark, but we paid for it). What you see here is the result.
We have a better starting point with the new house in Washington in one sense. The landscape is manageable, but not great in terms of use and maintenance and it is much, much bigger. 
Lorena and I need to decide how much of the lawn we want to maintain as landscape and how much we want to maintain as “forest.” We definitely have an opportunity to put in some terracing that will change the area behind the house into something eminently more usable. One of the first things we plan to do as soon as we get out there is take a bunch a pictures of the yard and start figuring out what we want to do. Part of our goal is to get me some manual labor with a shovel in doing any kind of transformation we plan. I think the landscape will be at least a three phase effort, especially since I am going to be providing the manual labor (unless I wimp out).