Saturday morning we were up early to check out the nearby garage sales (no luck though, since we were only looking for big furniture pieces that we could refinish). Then we visited two landscaping supply yards and a garden center, looking at paver stone options for our retaining walls. Unfortunately none of these places had very many options for pavers to build walls with a slight curve, mostly we found rectangular shaped pavers, and lots of flagstone and natural rocks. And their prices weren't really better than what we'd seen at Lowes the previous weekend.
But luckily we decided to try Home Depot, to see what their selection and prices looked like, and we found our pavers! They are a nice color blend of greys, reds and browns, so they will blend into the surrounding natural landscape really well, and they were only $1.18 each! We'd been budgeting for $2 pavers, and even though these are slightly smaller, so we need to use more (only 3 inches high, instead of 4), it's still a savings over what we found at the stone yards and Lowes.
We bought 300 pavers, along with 10 bags of paver base, and 20 bags of small decorative rocks which will cover the finished fire pit area (although someday we may replace the decorative rocks with a paver stone patio, but that will be in phase 2 of the project, and we have a feeling we may end up liking the more natural rock surface even more than we would a patio.).
