I think we discovered the weight limit for carrying things in our SUV....
Much better! Good thing we only live a mile from Lowes. That was just the first of three trips this weekend.
We had great weather this weekend, perfect weather for doing yard work. We decided to work on our raised flower beds in the backyard. We started bright and early on Saturday with the first trip to Lowes to buy the materials. We picked out the blocks we wanted to make the walls and loaded 75 onto a nearby flat cart. Then... I noticed that on the handle of the cart, in very small letters, it said "broken" and sure enough, the cart was missing a wheel and wouldn't move. Ugh! We had to unload all of our blocks and put them on another cart, not a good way to start the project! (fyi, the blocks weighed 18 pounds each) Luckily some nice Lowes employees helped us load the blocks into the car. After unloading the blocks into the garage (if you're keeping track, that was the 4th time we moved the blocks in less than 2 hours), the first thing we did was decide on the shape and spray paint the line on the grass.Then we dug a 4" deep trench for the wall.
Next we filled the trench with 2" of rocks and then 2" of sand to create a base for the wall.
The first row went down pretty quickly.

**at this point I stopped taking pictures. We put down a layer of garden cloth and used construction adhesive between the rows of blocks. We went back to Lowes to buy more blocks and dirt. By Saturday evening, the flower beds looked like this:
We really underestimated the amount of dirt we needed to fill the beds.

Sunday morning we went back to Lowes (after stopping by Panera to treat ourselves to an iced coffee, yum!) and bought a lot more dirt, some compost, mulch, and a few more plants and flowers. Of all of the things we've done on the house, this was by far the most physically demanding project and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to move tomorrow (it hurts my arms just to type this!) but I am proud of us, we were able to get the project completed by mid-day today, and even had time to do some yard work out front.
I can't wait to see how it looks as the plants grow and it starts to fill in a little more. Right now it's not very visible from the deck and that's where we spend most of our time, but it makes a huge difference already as you look at the house from the back, and I think it makes the deck look more finished. At some point we'd like to put in a patio too... we have so many plans, but only so much time and $$. This ended up costing a little more than we had planned, but hopefully from now on we'll only need to buy a few annual flowers each spring.

Project break down:

4 bags of rocks
4 bags of sand
80 blocks
35 bags of top soil
5 bags of compost
4 bags of mulch

This is what we planted (you can stopped reading now if you're not interested in this kind of stuff, this is more for me so I can keep track):

2 wine & roses weigela
1 goldmound spirea
1 rose glow barberry
3 moonshadow euonymus
2 knock out rose
6 african marigold
18 petunia