They pulled the back off our house

We did give them permission to do it. The stucco at the back of the house turns out to have gone rotten. I wasn't tremendously surprised: The source of the problem seems to have been the master bathroom. When we moved in we discovered we had subterranean termites there. The termites had been encouraged by a water leak under the shower. When the shower pan was removed it turned out that the whole bathroom floor was rotten, as was most of the interior wall. We had to have everything replaced.

Anyway, the exterior stucco seems to have gone rotten from a combination of moisture wicking up from the earth via the stucco that had been spread down into the soil line (a total no-no) and the moisture inside the walls from the leaking shower pan way back when. That internal leak had no doubt been going for some years, and the stucco-in-the-ground was 50 years old, so rotten is no surprise.

As a result we've had the stucco subcontractors strip most of the exterior of the gable end off. This has given us an opportunity to add insulation in the wall - we had none before, which makes the way our room got very cold in the winter more understandable - and there will be a new moisture barrier under the sheathing. An unexpected but appropriate upgrade.