On a single-family residence the main advantage of a shingled wall compared to a brick veneer cavity wall is its simplicity. A shingled wall is relatively easy to construct so that it is weather tight but a brick wall is not. A brick cavity wall is really two walls, an outer one that leaks like a sieve and acts as a water reservoir, and an inner hidden one that acts as a weather/air barrier, drainage plane, and ventilation space because the water has to get out at the bottom through weep holes that are often missing, buried, or blocked by mortar droppings and moisture driven out of the wet bricks into the cavity by the sun needs to get out of the cavity before passing through the highly vapor permeable weather/air barrier, sheathing, and insulation of the back-up wall where it might be stopped by an interior vapor barrier or high perm wall finish and cause serious problems that can be very expensive to fix. A shingled wall has a primary weather barrier of three overlapping layers of dense rot-protected wood over a secondary air/weather barrier that can be detailed to act as a drainage cavity in an excessively wet climate but since shingles do not act as a water reservoir this is not often necessary. So, for both of these residential wall claddings, if the materials are well selected, detailed and installed, they should last far longer than you will own your house and require incidental maintenance but in my opinion there is a far greater chance that the shingled wall will be built properly, the initial cost should be lower, and the cost of modifications (for any purpose) should also be lower. In my opinion, the quality of typical residential brickwork took a bad downward turn in the 60's and another one after the '73 Oil Embargo and again in the developer years of the 90's. It is certainly possible to find a contractor who will provide a good brick wall but from what I have seen just in this forum, homeowners not familiar with brick cavity wall detailing, or who don't hire someone to oversee the work, are too often relying on luck. Here is a link that might be useful: water management in brick walls

Cut the bottom edge of the sheets to a 30 degree angle, and keep it 1/4" above the flashing. Most important!: prime the bottom edge, and up a foot on the back side. Use oil primer. Maybe even go so far as to pre-paint the bottom edge before installing. This detail will keep the water dripping off the plywood, and prevent it becoming waterlogged. Casey

artkillery, you changed the peak of the gable between your last post and the one at 9:13 am. If the second post is correct, I would change back to having the front gable in stucco and the two flanking masses all in stone. The reason is that if the gable does not reach very high, stone all the way up may make it look heavy and squat. I would ask about the roof pitch on that gable and only use the heavier material if it is higher, not lower. JMO! (But, I think whatever you do the house will look marvelous, we tend to obsess over the details here :)

I agree, afsa, we have been diligent about painting and caulking these all wood windows which I believe were either Huddig or Huttig (a local company which sold out to another local millwork company) for about 10 years now. I'm just tired of fighting against the elements. Every year I have rotten sills and rotten brick mold in the lower corners of the windows. I even had my painter remove the tracks that hold the sashes to caulk and paint behind them where water was obviously penetrating. The sashes are warping and the gas seals are failing, and worst of all there's wood rot in the sheathing below the windows behind the stucco . . . again!! I don't know if this is primarily a window problem, an installation problem, a stucco problem, or some of all, but my experience with all wood windows has not been good to say the least. Hopefully, new windows, installed and sealed properly will keep my home from becoming a bigger money pit! With all that we have spent on maintenance and repairs, we could have paid for at least half of our new windows by now. I a hopeful to find a solution :-)