And the last one with a view of the garage.

Congrats on moving forward with your new house.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the water table business. We stoned the front gable and the side, where it made sense. You might want to stone the gable end to balance the stone on the front entry, but not have it as the band that goes all around the house. You can stone the little building and stone around the rear patio. I think that will give you a nice blend and balance of the use of materials on the exterior. You might want to go to houzz.com and look at stone exteriors to see the difference and make sure it's what you want...far easier to do at this point while materials haven't been purchased.

Regardless, that's not the question you asked. We selected our stone based on the fact that we live in New England and wanted the stone to look appropriate for our geography....Arizona red rock wouldn't make sense. So we purchased real New England field stone that is sawed thin. We pulled the taupe color from out of the rock for the siding and we did go with blue stone for the porch and the walkways and patio. Our siding is certainteed vinyl cedar impressions. All of the trim is azak. We went with 50 year architectural shingles on the roof. We wanted our home to be as maintenance free as possible.

We stoned the entire gable to keep it unified.

And we stoned the foundation wall on the end so it blended in with the retaining walls.

Being in New England, we ended up with tons and tons of stone which came out of our foundation hole. Because we used real new england field stone on the house, we were able to make use of our own field stone in the rest of the landscaping. About 90% of the landscape stone was from our property including the retaining walls and sitting walls around the patio area.

We continued the use of the new england field stone and blue stone inside in our family room behind the woodstove.