It's getting warm enough that far south that you may want to focus on hardscape until it cools down in early fall. Installing new plants in hot humid weather puts a lot of stress on them.

Is there a covered porch across the entire front? Is that how you access the front door from the driveway? I agree that some more pictures are needed to understand the existing layout.

Could the existing sidewalk be cleaned to remove dirt and brighten its appearance? Power washing and/or application of concrete cleaner might make it look newer.

What variety of magnolia do you have? The mature size of Magnolias varies a lot with variety.

Thanks for such quick responses, appreciate the comments about the house. More pictures included below.

To answer some of your questions - yes, the "porch" overhangs the entire front of the house, the whole way around.

Couple of questions for y'all - yaardvark, in your design, is the low-set green foliage that covers most of the design groundcover? And for whitewatervol, that makes perfect sense about waiting until the fall to plant. But as afar as "hardscape," do you mean more than just the pavers that border the garden beds? And also, I love the idea of 8" wide brick pavers that don't elevate above the ground, but would a 8-10" paver stone wall be more appealing?

One of the things in the list of things-that-look-bad, is 'fake retaining walls'. If that's what you mean by an "... 8 - 10" paver stone wall," I would say don't do it.

Since changes to the walkway and mowing strip was brought up, I think that's what whitewatervol was referring to by "hardscape." (... any work that's not planting)

Now that I see how the porch and walk interface, I'd definitely make some improvements. The simplest, most effective thing you could do is to substantially widen the walk as it approaches the porch, so that it is really inviting. Now, especially with the raised edging, which makes the walk look sunken, it looks a bit like a section of obstacle course.

Another thing that is disagreeable about the walk is how there is a 3" riser and 6" riser at the porch. This should be constructed so there is a single step ... or no step at all, if the grade of yard would permit it. I would definitely rebuild the last several feet of walk in order to fix this. (To eliminate the step all together, it would require rebuilding more feet of the walk.)

I live in the hot South, too, and do not worry much about planting during the summer. We have irrigation and many of the plants that grow here like heat to grow. With a little extra water during the first month or so, most things do pretty well. Plus, once the rainy season starts, we usually get out of having to water for a few weeks.

Yes, I did mean that I might focus on the non-plant improvements now and then install plants in the early fall.

AV's suggestion for the end of the walk looks like a substantial upgrade to me. You might want to include brick in a manner similar to the rest of the sidewalk to tie it all together. It looks like you have a substantial amount of loose brick currently being used for edging that matches your existing brick.

Both the loose brick edging and the grey colored edging look untidy to my eyes. I'd want to investigate another way to edge.

One plant suggestion I will make is confederate or star jasmine as a groundcover (AV suggests using a groundcover in the initial sketch). We used that plant when we had a house in zone 8 and it was a great groundcover. It's evergreen, has great scented flowers, and holds up well to full sun, drought, and heat. The only maintenance it needed was edging a few times a year and a mowing once a year in early spring.

The lowest growing gardenia varieties might work for the short shrubs shown at the base of the posts. Again, evergreen with scented flowers.

If you can afford it a new path that centered on the door would be much better.