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I'd pick your favourite couple of options and make up a larger panel in the bond you'll be laying, and your preferred pointing. 4 if pushed but it's super personal. The high contrast white will work best with a very regular brick and very clean/recessed pointing, otherwise I think you'll have some prominent but wavy looking lines of mortar. Definitely buckets not shovels if you want consistency

Not planning on using dyes and will order the required 10 ton of sand in one go, so as to avoid possibility of slight colour shift.

+1 to this

Out of curiosity are you using premixed mortar or adding a pigment. My experience of using either for coloured mortar is expect some variance in the batches/mixes. The mix on site can be worse or better than ready spread depending on the diligence of your brickie and his choice of “gauging” - for some it’s the gauging bucket, for others it’s a shovel… I’ve found it really hit and miss over the years but for my self build I went with white cement, and hydrated lime with a batch of sand that was more than I needed so I got colour continuity throughout. The sand you get from your merchant can vary - we used to get a red/orange sand but my brickies told me a good grey/brown sand to order direct from a quarry and it worked a treat.

Number one. Not just because the more grey colours seems to contrast with the block, and overpower the eyes (this will lead to your eyes looking more at the smaller surface area of the wall and be distracting, rather than the feeling the blockwork is the wall, and the mortar just s supporting role) But because there are green tones in the first that will age better. Over the years this will allow nature to grown alongside it in a complimentary way. If you intend an ultra modern gravel and slab surrounding design, then fair enough, but anything growing next to the grey would seem like a weed in a lawn and out of place. (just purely my opinion and feel free to ignore)

Doesn't really explaining the four other struts though does it? The building was built by a professional agricultural building company, it isn't something we have knocked up. That it was where the cows entered the building on the left for milking. Don't know why they didn't extend the perpendicular i beams down to the ground but if I remove the two lower struts and then bolt the gable wall to the block work I don't think it would be very 'flappy'. Plus I would extend the block wall to finish the wall which would keep any wind out and bolt onto there as well.

Are you letting it go silver? Have you viewed final "colour" with mortar as well? Image of our attached just as eg. Took us a while to choose whole "package"

That is what my wife likes too.

It’s brick facade for ground floor and then thermowood Ash cladding for upper floor. I like the white as although it has high contrast, it’s the most contemporary looking.

Number 4 for me

You have a ‘digital mixer shower’, some are pumped to draw stored hot/cold water from gravity or ‘open pipe’ systems, others can accept high (balanced) pressure hot & cold inputs; both mix the temp digitally so are quite elegant solutions if getting into a pre-warmed shower is on the wish list. Caveat is, these wear out and need replacing more often than a basic thermostatic shower mixer that you control manually.

I didn't make my shower comment clear at all. It is an electrically powered shower using hot water from a boiler, mixing with cold. 2 pipes lead to the position as normal, but terminate at t he powered unit from where 1 pipe leads to the shower. There is no argument for economy, it is convenience and control. I had forgotten how bad some showers can be until in an old hotel recently.

It is subjective but firstly is your whole frontage brick, may make a difference.... We only have a plinth, (9 at highest where ground slops at back of house) so we chose high contrast mortar that "matched" the cladding. If it had been the whole house, would have been too stark for us, and maybe the planners. Having said all that my vote would be nit no.1 (too warm), no.3 if your looking for high contrast, no.4 if you want it to "blend"

I do. Sometimes it's wrong. But trust me accuracy is paramount to realism - I'm on it! You've got bedtime reading of Beer-Lambert and quaternion maths. You wont like either of those trust me!

1.Render-board 2. 50mm Batton so you have void and air 3. some sort of waterproof breather membrane (tyvek housewrap for example) 4. osb 5. insulation 6. vcl (tyvek airguard reflective for example ) 7. Plywood

I wouldn't argue with Claude!!

Keen to see what mortar colour people this works best with the bricks we’ve chosen. i appreciate it’s subjective, but the wife and I are currently in disagreement.

Te-he! As I said water looks different from different angles. So near us (the camera) you see the turquoise and seabed further you would not at this angle; i.e. you cant see the nice blue because our angle is so low - we are looking over it. If I pulled the camera up into the air and looked down at that spot it's there. So looking at water and looking across water are very different views - it's something through the previous 5 versions (oh my!) I just couldn't get correct. look at piccy 1; water we are near is 'clear' (depends on a LOT of maths, sun angle, sea bed, refraction, specular etc etc etc etc ), but look across at the mountains, a reflection and is dark. Beer-lambert (remember you started this science/maths argument! 🙂 ). But I'll let my mate Claude answer.... " The blue stops because of viewing angle, not shadow. What you're seeing as turquoise is light that passed through the surface, reflected off sunlit sand, and came back out — and how much survives depends on how far it travelled through water, not how deep the water is. Directly in front of the camera you're looking down into it, so a metre of depth costs about two metres of travel and the sand shows through. Along the beach receding to the right you're looking almost flat across the surface, and the same metre of depth costs a hundred times more travel. Nothing survives that, so it goes dark. That much is real: at grazing angles you genuinely do stop seeing into water, and a photo taken from that low across a lake shows a mirror at the far shore rather than turquoise. Where ours overdoes it is that the surface doesn't yet bend the view ray. Refraction puts a hard ceiling on the underwater path — about 1.5× the depth, from any viewpoint — so real shallows stay bright the whole length of a beach. Without that ceiling the path grows without limit as the view flattens, and the band dies far earlier than it should. Separately, what replaces it should be a bright mirror of the horizon sky; ours fades reflections to black near horizontal, which is why that stretch reads dark instead of silver."

Probably render once I get there.

Just to add, I checked how much water you'll get out of an electric shower. If the incoming water temp is 8C and you want your shower to be 38C then a 12kw shower will output about 6 litres per minute. That's a pretty low flow. In my book a 'decent' shower is about 10lpm. If you like the luxury rainfall type showers they are more like 20lpm. 38C is about the average shower temp for people. Some like it hotter, in which case an electric shower will flow even less water. Now the incoming water temp varies by time of year and how the water gets to you. But in winter when you usually want the hottest showers its around 8C.

Looking at it more, I think it looks odd because the blue water travels around the edge of the beach, but only for a short distance, before turning dark by the beach. Why in reality wouldn't the blue continue all the way along the beach? There is nothing to indicate that there should be shadow in that area.

All the things as an ex games programmer I notice and hate. But with finite compute and finite ram compromises must be made. Give me and my new best friend Claude (I've not even sworn at it yet! , honestly not once! , whilst CHAT , well (expletive deleted) me ... I couldn't stop swearing ). The point you made is valid "looks wrong, but not sure why" - I do that a lot. I have to explain what IS wrong - usually in a technical term. So you find things visually 'wrong' thats fine. I just grabbed some random screenshots tbh .

That makes zero difference, you do not need to trade anything in. You are applicable to the scheme. But that said, so was I, but did it all my self without a grant, not really that expensive. UFH is the way to go with a well insulated floor. Then run it low and slow whatever the heat source. After having gas now heat pump, the cost saving with heat pump are ace. Battery makes all the difference (with or with out solar) only pay 10p per kWh and get 3 charge periods a day if I need it.

They are pretty crap AFAIK. You get ones with a small tank (15L) which then use energy continuously to keep warm and will give you reasonable flow for the first 15L and then cold water if you keep wanting to use water. Or you get them that heat directly on demand. The little 3kw ones you see advertised won't do much if you expect much flow (some limit the flow to produce the set temperature, in which case you will likely get a dribble). The 15L tank ones will heat the water to 80C to get the maximum storage from the small volume. They aren't well insulated so will lose a lot of energy to the surroundings. Compare this to a big well insulated cylinder designed to run off a heatpump (50C). The big cylinder stores less heat per unit volume but is better insulated, and the losses from the tank are much lower as the surface area/volume ratio is better AND the delta between the water and the surrounding air is lower. A good 300L tank at 50C will lose less than 2kwh a day. If heating with direct electric thats what 50p? If with a heatpump that's more like 12-15p. It's a fairly weak shower, especially if the incoming water is especially cold. If you haven't experienced it yet (or this is all you are used to) I encourage you to try the difference. Find some friends/airbnb's and try an electric shower vs a modern pressurised water tank fed system (not an older gravity fed system). Night and day. The government grant can be used for new houses so I would strongly check the rules before ruling it out. If not strictly covered right now, I suspect you could get creative with heat sources used during construction that you then need to 'upgrade' at the end. Insulation will be by far the best investment you make in the property both for comfort and running costs. Insulating an old building is hard and compromises will be needed, but in general if the compromise is a smaller room vs a colder room I'd go for the smaller room. Always

If only I knew what you were talking about. The last picture looks great by the way.