When we bought this house we took on the empty dirt backyard as well. We actually were kinda excited about it because then we could make it whatever we wanted. We've also learned that creating a yard from scratch is a lot easier to think up and draw on paper than to make it happen.
Luckily for me, I married a very handy, determined and hardworking man! He's been faithfully working on that yard for a couple months now. We can finally see a little of that hard work pay off.
The house that is directly behind us is about 3 feet higher than we are so our yard has this slope along the back wall. We decided to make that into a garden since we weren't sure what else we could do with it.
Here's the garden wall from start to finish. :)

I did help Trent bring each of these stones into the backyard. Each one weighed 55lbs, in the heat of the day, which in AZ means HOT! It was brutal. Poor Trent did the rest on his own that way. Never complained once though. See what I mean? Hard worker!

We're planning to put a fire pit in the middle of where the curve is.

TaDa!