Grilles on street side are an option, and fairly "normal". Not sure how much that will save though.

I can't comment on any of the rest... Pal might be better.

I think I would postpone the screens, then look for another place to trim costs. Mill work, counter surfaces, hardware are all easy to upgrade later. Your window/transom, French door/transom combination sounds lovely. And, as you said, they are in a room that you would use and enjoy often. I agree with kirkhall. Grilles on the rear elevation would be completely optional. Not sure about the savings.

I would definitely wait on the screens and save the $700 for now.

On the doors, can you make 1 set of the doors stationary? That would save some money right there. Think about your furniture placement in that room and whether or not you would feasibly use both sets of doors. If not, I would only make the one likely to get the most use functional.

Only go to 8' doors if the elevation will look right to you. $1500 in savings isn't worth it if everytime you look at the doors/exterior of the house you're unhappy with the look. If you have transoms all along that section of elevation, then you should definitely stick with transoms over the doors, IMO.

If I remember right, GBGs ran ~$16-25 per window depending on the pattern. SDL & TDL will cost event more. So there is definitely money to be saved there. With that being said, it would bother me to not have the uniformity of grids all around the house, but that's just me. Deleting the grids everywhere except the front of the house is really going to come down to your personal taste.

Hope this helps!

I would get the windows you want (love) and cut costs on things that can be more easily changed later. Like vinyl floors in the bathrooms instead of tile, hollow core doors on closets instead of solid doors, and cheaper kitchen counters & bathroom vanity tops.

But ... windows matter a lot to me. I have no idea why, but they just do. We went with Marvin windows (wood frames, aluminum clad exteriors with SDL 6 over 1) and I love looking at them every day. The bathroom floors are vinyl (surprisingly realistic, 3 people have said, "I love your tile!" when they see the floor). We got vanities off of Craigslist. But the windows ... I just love.

As long as you aren't going with the cheap "$99 Vinyl Window Sale!" type windows you probably need to weigh what matters most to you. What can you most easily live with? The tradeoffs are different for everyone.

I agree with others. Look for other places to cut costs instead of the windows. However, transoms do cost money. And if you have any circle tops, those cost 2x as much as the window they sit above.
For me I place expensive/transom windows on the front, and leave them off the back and sides. If you are wanting light in the room/views...transoms do not help you. A single large window will be a lot less then a window with a transom, and also let in more light. Views are uneffected either way. Typically each square transom above the window adds 1/3-1/2 the cost of the window it sits above.

I wouldn't and didn't cut windows in order to save money - get what you love. If you can love taller windows instead of transoms, fine. Personally, I chose to keep my transoms even though quite a few people didn't think they really suited my house. I figured there was enough who thought it would be fine so that allowed me to do what I really wanted.

I did cut my deck in half, or maybe even less to save some money. I'm just going to have stairs coming down from a set of patio doors. We're not supposed to move in until October anyway so we wouldn't really use a big deck this year and next year we can hopefully afford to build on to it.

If your boys are anything like my boys, I might be hesitant to go without screens until next year. But I'm the one who found 13 dinky cars in her central vac ducting so maybe nobody has boys like mine.

Good luck.

I am also planning a new build and using Anderson 400 casement windows. How often to you open windows? I hardly ever opened the ones in my last house...in fact, the screens were stored under the beds. To me they interfere with the view and my DH always liked to keep the windows shut because to open them let in a lot of humidity and it made the AC work that much harder. So I doubt if I will order the screens to begin with on my build...don't know how much it will save, but every little bit helps.

I am also planning a new build and using Anderson 400 casement windows. How often to you open windows? I hardly ever opened the ones in my last house...in fact, the screens were stored under the beds. To me they interfere with the view and my DH always liked to keep the windows shut because to open them let in a lot of humidity and it made the AC work that much harder. So I doubt if I will order the screens to begin with on my build...don't know how much it will save, but every little bit helps.