Siding

1. vinyl siding panels is about $250 per square.
2. Fiber Cement siding costs closer to $400,
   
3. aluminum siding is about $430,
   
4. yellow pine clapboard siding is just shy of $500,
   
5. cedar clapboard siding is a little over $500,
   
6. cedar shingle siding costs about $700, stucco is about $900,
   
7. imitation stone veneer siding is about $1000,
   
8. brick masonry is about $1800,
   
9. and stone is about $2400.

Real wood siding is a classic choice to protect a home's exterior walls; unfortunately it requires regular painting/staining and careful maintenance or it will rot, warp, crack or split. Plywood or hardwood sheet siding (also known as engineered wood siding) is manufactured to look like real wood but doesn't require as much maintenance.

Typical costs:

Lumber prices vary considerably from year to year and region to region, which directly affects the cost of installing real wood siding. Typically it averages $6,500 -$7,500 to have a contractor install 1,250 exterior square feet of yellow pine, spruce or fir clapboard (overlapping rows); $7,000 -$8,500 for cedar clapboard over that same size area; and $9,000 -$10,000 for cedar shingles (also called cedar shakes). For 3,000 exterior square feet, costs jump to $14,500 -$16,000 for yellow pine, spruce or fir clapboard; $15,000 -$17,000 for cedar clapboard; and $18,000 -$25,000 for cedar shakes. Redwood, which is hard to obtain outside of the western states, costs about the same as or a little more than cedar. Engineered wood siding (plywood or hardwood sheets made up of bits of wood bonded together with special resins and treated with insecticide and fungicide) runs about $3,000 -$5,000 for 1,250 square feet; or $8,000 -$10,000 for 3,000 square feet. To roughly calculate exterior square footage, add together the length of the four sides of the house then multiply by the height of the walls. A home 10' tall, 38' long and 25' wide has 950 square feet [38x25=950] of interior floor space but 1,260 square feet [(38+38+25+25)x10=1,60] of exterior wall space. To cut costs, some homeowners have siding installed on the front and sides of a house but not the back wall because it isn't visible from the street.