Spring Fever: Landscape planning

This is the front of my trailer.  Isn't it epic?  The inside is much nicer, trust me, and at some point the siding will be redone to match/complement the skirting.  However, first in line is to take care of the pile of slime that my hill turns into when we get any moisture at all.  If you can't tell, I'm on a bit of an incline here.  It's basically flat where the house is but slopes down from there and on the back where the deck is the hill gets a touch steeper.  When we had a contractor here to build the skirting and deck, one of his helpers had a little tractor to flatten the spot for the deck and, without asking anybody (or billing us later), he dug up the whole front side too.  It's not as lumpy as it was and we would've needed to do some of that too, but he did it right before winter so I've been stuck with slimy mud every time it rains or snow melts.  I put down some landscape fabric, a little sand, and a few bricks to walk on to get through the winter without going too insane.  We still don't know who did it exactly, who said he should, and why we never got a bill for it.  It was one of a string of strange things that happened with that contractor so we're done working with him.  All that dirt work and there's still big gaps under the skirting that caused several days of frozen pipes this winter...if there was one thing I would've wanted done it would've been that.

Well, enough whining, what's done is done.  What I did yesterday was measured and flagged where my front entryway room, stairs, and garden terrace will go.  The sun beats on this side of the house in the summer and the wind whips around in the winter, so the front door needs a little extra protection from the elements.  We'll build on a little front room with a bench, coat hooks, a boot mat, and two cat doors (one from the living room and one outside, so the weather doesn't leak into the house), and a landing with stairs.  Those little metal stairs are hard to maneuver on and there's no place to set stuff down to open the door.

For the garden terrace, we'll add topsoil to make it level with the top and build a little brick retaining wall so there's a flat terrace from the edge of the skirting to just above where the propane tank sits.  I'm thinking below that in a semicircle between the new trees we'll build a little rain garden, fix the gutters, and set up the downspouts to drain into it.  Sounds like a lot of work.  At least I have it flagged out now.  Bedtime!