This is a great topic. I'm posting mainly to throw out ideas and hope the "smart kids" will chime in and keep the thread alive.
If you want to save money, there are a number of ways to go depending on how much "sweat equity" you are willing to provide. I've been researching this very topic for almost two years and have gotten a lot of good advice from the folks on this BBS. Here is what I (think I) know about house building...
1) TRADITIONAL: You can have someone build a house for you for about $90 per square foot. Nothing fancy. Justa nice, decent house. This is based on the experience of a colleague who's family builds houses here in MA.
2) MODULAR: You can get a modular house built and installed for around $70 per square foot. You'll need to have the site prep done on your own. But you'll also get the project done faster than option #1. Again, a different colleague here had this done and was extremely pleased with the results.
3) KIT: You can knock the price down to $40 per square foot if you are willing to buy a kit and build the house yourself.I've looked at steel frame house kits, Structural Insulated Panel kits, and log cabins. All seem do-able - but you have to be willing to sweat a lot.
Here is a thread I started about steel frame houses with some great pics of Groesbeck Hurricane's steel house...
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/showthread.php?threadid=209383&highlight=steel+frame
4) eBay: Okay, I'm not kidding here. I was searching for the absolute rock bottom, cheapest way to build a house. So I thought, "Hey, nobody actually buys a kit
car new from the factory. It always makes more sense to buy a kit from some assclown on eBay who could not finish his/her project and is selling the kit for pennies on the dollar. So would this work with house kits?" Well, sure enough, I found some very nice kits on eBay for as low as $10 per square foot. They ranged from log cabin kits to 4000 sq ft houses to piles of metal framing that will probably never be erected.
5) Earth Berm and Concrete Block: Call me crazy, but I found an article on Mother Earth News describing how to build an earth bermed house using a "dry stacked cement block" method. Very inexpensive and it had super low heating and cooling costs. The idea of building a house from concrete block seems very exciting. But I have not been able to find any good resources explaining how a DIY owner/builder can do it or how concrete and earth bermed houses would fit in with local building codes...But here is a company that does consulting for passive solar construction...
http://thenaturalhome.com/passivesolar.html
6) RECYCLED HOUSES: I just learned about this option recently. So I know very little about it. Apparently, the idea is to buy a house from someone who wants it off their property (presumably to build something else). Then you transport it to yours. Basically a win-win agreement.