Two surfaces at the front of the house, and one material question under both.
A mosaic for the crumbling concrete front staircase, plus brickwork for a new path section — including mosaic brick areas made from bricks cut into shapes.
The staircase is the urgent half: concrete that is coming apart, and a mosaic as the surface it gets. The path is the new half — brick, laid as brick, except where it stops being a running bond and becomes a field of cut pieces.
They are one project because they share a front door and an edge. Whatever the treads are made of, the path arrives at the bottom of them.
Which makes the first decision a tool decision, not a pattern one. Mosaic brick areas mean cutting brick into shapes, over and over, by hand — so what does the cutting comes before what the cutting makes.
It sits with the other two masonry ideas for the front of the house: the rotated-brick retaining wall and the balloon-concrete units. Same street frontage, same pile of brick.
One is repair. One is new work.
The staircase
Concrete, crumbling, at the front of the house. The plan for it is a mosaic — a surface made of pieces, on the one part of the entry that everybody walks on.
The path
A new section of brickwork, with mosaic brick areas inside it: bricks cut into shapes and set as a pattern, rather than laid whole in a bond.
Considering a brick cutter.
That is the whole of it. Nothing is cut, no pattern is drawn, and the tool is the open question.