You can lay brick in sand - that is pretty easy to do and can be a DIY project - it took us about 2-3 years to do ours, but that included a dry stone retaining wall as well.

At the dorm apt at the boarding school where my DH taught, we used old wooden pallets from a local grocery store. They had tons of these stacked outside and very much wanted to get rid of them. DH dug out the earth so they were flush with the surrounding grass. We first made a "sidewalk" from the area where we parked our car to the kitchen door. It was great -easy to shovel all the Maine snow in the window and the sun would warm up the wood - dogs loved it. Then we added a pallet terrace. Yes, one must be sure to get pallets where the rails are close together - all pallets are not the same! The terrace had a few problems with chair legs from time to time, but it was a free material and we had no intention of adding to the schools infrastructure!