Hi Victoria – thank you for your comment. We haven’t considered wood cladding, but I haven’t seen it around on neighbouring houses so I doubt planning would approve that. The other option we’ve considered is Hanging Tiles to match the roof, but the builder isn’t keen and I don’t like the extra cost – although if it keeps planning happy, I would prefer it to mismatching bricks!

I agree with Amelia, red brick garden wall. To match the existing garden boundary wall on the left in first photo with blue brick coping, staggered to suit ground slope, coping should also be slightly sloped to shed water so water isn't standing on top of wall.

If you can match the bricks do and then paint the window frames. Man About The House painted his (I think) UPVC windows a lovely sage green which would brighten the whole thing. He has posted some pics somewhere- it looks really lovely. Hopefully he can advise. I’ve totally copied his idea and the new windows are arriving in a couple of weeks. Can’t wait to see the difference it’ll make to our tired exterior!

Ah thank you. I used dye from Dye Brick - https://www.dyebrick.com/ - for both the bricks and the mortar. They were super quick to deliver. My top tip would to be more patient than I was!! I should have spent more time finding which colour was best... and then sticking to it rather than changing my mind :) After a bit of testing I used a 50:50 mix of two of the colours available. And what I should have done is applied the soot wash mix (a separate product) afterwards... what I did do was mix them all together hence I just got a browner mix rather than the orange I wanted. Sometimes I can be a real idiot!! But I have a little dye left and having looked at bricks around the green door pic that Carolina has attached I may try and do a few more orange and some pure soot ones to get a bit more variety in colour rather than it being so uniform. Porch cost me about £80 to dye. Could possibly be done cheaper if you didnt need so many brick colours (Red, orange and soot) and didnt need to do the mortar too.