Ask and you shall receive. This houzz post has a bounty of great ideas! https://www.houzz.com/discussions/building-a-custom-home-any-must-ha-dsvw-vd~84124

I am building a house at the moment (last 4 years actually).

I made the decision to spend money where it is hidden and not easy to upgrade later. We went with spray foam insulation in the walls. It did add about $12k to the cost of the insulation bill, but on a $350-400k construction budget, it is a small cost overall.

If you can afford to do ICF for the outside walls, you will have excellent energy efficiency. A friend did ICF on a 7500 sq ft house and his utility bills are $125-175 per month. He is all electric in GA, so the summers can be hot and humid, all this with a 2 ton HVAC system. His AC stays off until mid-July. 15" thick outside walls do wonders for energy use. Energy efficiency was a plus for our design. We skimped on the windows a bit, but saved $25k over the ones I really wanted. We found a local building material supply company that had a lot of windows on clearance, so we took all of the style that matched our plans. We did build the house around the sizes we bought (standard sizes), but I am happy with them so far.

A lot will depend on how long you will live there. Since we are planning on living here until we are no longer living, we decided to have a minimum 3' door width, all hallways are at least 4' wide.

Thanks guys! This is awesome. @paarlberg, what is ICF? I'm not familiar with that term.

Insulated Concrete Forms.. Here is a company that produces the forms. I can't comment on their quality though, just the top response from google. Basically it is a large Lego block made out of foam, they have a void in the middle that you pour concrete into. You end up with a 6-8" thick concrete wall that has 2" of foam on each side. They also put a lot of rebar in the forms prior to pouring the concrete. It is like a 12" thick styrofoam and concrete cooler for your outside walls. ;-) They are also Hurricane, Tornado and Earthquake proof, or so they say.

http://www.buildblock.com/?gclid=CKbJrd7E-rQCFQ2znQodBTYA1g

If you are doing radiant heating in the floor, they have floor panels as well that you can run your radiant tubing thru. You can do just the outside walls with the ICF, everything else can be wood framing.

You can also search on Houzz for "ICF". There are a lot of houses that used it.

Lucky you to be building in my home state. It doesn't get any better. You should have a good architect to guide you through the process. I always have my clients fill out a questionnaire, which makes them think about and write down their ideas for each room. It really helps couples to work together on this and agree on what's important to both of you separately and together. I would look hard at where you spend your time now, because your behavior isn't likely to change in a new house. I'm designing more simple and open homes these days. A really great kitchen-dining-great room area is the heart of most of the homes I design. Here in Colorado, formal dining rooms and living are going away and more of the building budget is being spent on great outdoor spaces. Good luck with your project!

If I had it to do over again, I would have probably gone the ICF route. The additional costs in the exterior wall are almost completely eliminated since you won't need to insulate those walls. It would have cost me about $20k more to have done ICF, my insulation was about $15k for the outside walls (including basement), almost a wash.

Spend the money to make sure it is the best structure you can afford, final things like lights, etc.. you can change later without a huge expense.

Not sure if copper theft is a big issue in your area or not, but it is here. Someone took about 1/2 my copper. I put up cameras after that and the same guy came back for the rest and we caught him. They were well worth the expense, I have caught quite a few people snooping around and have either called the police, or confronted them. I am lucky enough to be 2 houses away, so I have a 100mbps wireless link between the houses for all 6 of my cameras. If you are not close enough for a wireless link, you can put an inexpensive internet connection on the property.

We had another incident this morning with someone trying to steal on the job site. 9+ cops were on the property in under 4 minutes. The cameras have been worth every penny. Also, the arresting officer said he wished more people had cameras. Hard evidence is hard to dispute. I copied the video onto a flash drive and they copied it to their laptop in the car and added it as evidence. :-)