To furnish the house you can either:
- Use the workbenches inside the home to make the various items; each item will tell you what's needed to make it, and some materials can be scarce if you're on a PC and have certain mods running
- Tell your steward (if you have one) to do it; this avoids any issues with finding materials, but is a lot slower in most cases
Neither is particularly better than the other, although the character's RP may dictate which way you go.
One thing with mining the stone: unlike mining ore, the action of mining the stone (or clay, for that matter) does not stop until you tell it to (hitting 'S' (or the proper controller button for moving backwards) will do so, for one), so if you let it run for a bit you'll end up with quite a bit of stone on hand. As for how to know when to stop: every so often a message will pop up in the upper left corner of the screen saying '4 Stone added' (without the ' marks), and after five of these (which will give you 36 Quarried Stone) you'll have enough.
In case you're wondering: the message is actually incorrect after the first time, because the amount you get per iteration is based on the number of pickaxe strikes. The first one, which is three strikes, gives 4 stone, while the rest are 6 and give 8. As such, 5 iterations are needed, because 4 will only yield 28 (4+(3*8)), which is 2 short. If you interrupt an iteration you get 4 stones, regardless of how many strikes in you are.