Hi. I have been using SOLIDWORKS since 2015, but for the first time now, I have to design a brick and mortar furnace for a sauna. I know rough dimensions of the space in which the furnace has to be built, as well as dimension of some off-shelf components (steel doors, reinforcement bars, heat transfer pipes, etc.) that will be laid in between the bricks. I also know the dimensions of the bricks I want to use.

What I need for the final result is a BOM with brick count and mortar requirements, as well as some basic reference drawings to use during brick laying. I want to optimize the design so that a minimum amount of brick cutting is required (to use full-sized bricks wherever possible).

What I am not sure is the best design strategy for such a thing. I want my design to be flexible, allowing for different brick laying variants until I figure out which one is the best, and if brick cutting is required in some places, to know how many off-cut pieces I have left so I can use them in other areas of the furnace.

I am thinking that perhaps Top-down multibody strategy with Weldments enabled (for brick body count), and the inserting this into an assembly to mate it with the off-shelf parts and check for interferences or gaps, should be reasonably convenient, but split bricks will be an issue when it comes to BOM, as they will be recognized as totally separate items due to their different geometry. Also, I have no idea how to represent mortar in between the bricks, so that I can get an accurate total. 
If I went with Bottom-up assembly approach, I could probably partially solve the split brick issue by using configurations (full brick, half-brick, third brick, etc.), but this would be very inflexible if I realize that I need a different brick layout. It would also probably rebuild slow as hell.

I have ideas, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel. What is the traditional approach in designing brick and mortar stuff in SOLIDWORKS? What strategies prove to be the most efficient for a flexible model and an accurate BOM?