Electrical – building a home from ground up. money is not an issue. electrical wiring

Be practical - not rigid

Only you know your home's layout. Either go to "switch first" or "lamp first" depending on what is most practical based on the "lay of the land".

For instance, having arrived at a lamp, the nearest thing may be another lamp in another room. OK, go there, and then to its switch. And behind that wall is a third switch going to a third lamp. Etc. Power-S=L-L=S-S=L for instance.

Also, you are allowed to "tee" in any junction box (remember junction boxes must be always accessible and cannot be covered over by any part of the building, other than lamps and cover plates), so if branching a "tee" off an existing circuit run makes sense, go ahead and do it.

Generally you use /2 cable. You need /3 cable between a switch and all the lamps it controls -- unless the lamp(s) are at the very end of the string.

Avoid the too-many-wires trap - change routing

If you have 3-way switches, things get more complicated. You can easily reach a point where you need 5 wires (hot, neutral, switched-hot, 2 messengers). /5 is hard to get, and you're not allowed to parallel cables to make one. On these, slow down, graph it out and possibly change your topology - for instance make the other 3-way a dedicated branch with a /3. Or use smart switches. Or change wiring methods to conduit and use as many single THHN wires as you need.

For instance if your layout is Power-3-L-L-3-receptacle that's impossible without /5, so you do it this way

 Power-3-L-L-receptacle
       |
       3

and only need /3. Even if the /3 cable between the switches is laid right next to the lines to the lamps, it's not considered parallel because it doesn't connect electrically.

Other tricks

Standard practices in house design are a compromise to save money. No need for you to compromise, here are some things you can do better.

Run 20A (12 AWG) circuits even where not required -- though this is a lost cause with lighting, as with efficient LEDs, all the lighting in your home won't add up to 12A.

Put overhead lights in every room - the new thing of "don't install any overhead lights, just switch a receptacle" isn't trendy, it's just cheap. And it prevents use of dimmers. EMT's and other first responders will thank you.

Kitchens require 2 circuits for countertop receptacles, but your chef would love to have as many as possible. Most kitchen appliances which use heat use 1500 watts of power. The max for a 20A circuit is 2400W, so it can't support two. You can imagine in a 2-circuit kitchen, that will drive a chef nuts. Can't run the skillet, waffler and toaster at the same time. You can fix that by running plenty more circuits, and adding outlets beyond what is required, e.g. putting 2 dual receptacles where one is required. Also think about where people like to charge their phones.

Either use GFCI receptacles, or use plain receptacles with GFCI protection upstream (e.g. at the breaker panel). To extremes: split each kitchen receptacle and run /2/2 cable (hot hot2 neutral neutral2) to the panel, and punch them down to two GFCI breakers. That means each socket gets a dedicated breaker.

If you put the refrigerator on a dedicated circuit, that assures nothing else will trip it. I hate the idea of GFCIs on a fridge circuit, as it only makes this trip problem worse. Assure it stays dedicated by bringing it to a single receptacle (1 socket not the usual 2). If you expect to have a chest freezer, also provision a dedicated circuit for that.

Same with extra circuits in bathrooms - hair dryer and curler and little electric heater!

Speaking of bathrooms, it's forward-thinking to lay conduit between the switch area and the overhead light/fan/heater/etc. That way you don't have to sweat how many wires to put there, you can just pull what you need.

Ditto anywhere you put a ceiling-fan box.

Get the biggest panel possible. The size of your service panel is no place to save $50. We get lots of "My panel is full, help" questions but never a "what do I do with all these panel spaces?" problems. Aim for the panel to have 50% spare spaces when you are done.

Use subpanels to avoid long hauls of many parallel Romex cables. A friend has a long house with his panel on one end, not much in the middle, and a cluster of bedrooms and bathrooms on the far end. That's the perfect application for a subpanel, and a subpanel is an easy/cheap way to add a lot more spaces: instead of an expensive 60-space panel, have a 40 main and a 30 sub. You could even feed a subpanel with a GFCI breaker, conferring GFCI protection to every circuit in it, and saving money on individual devices.

Speaking of refrigerators/freezers... Think forward about which loads would be most urgent for an emergency generator or solar-panel/battery/inverter system. Put these in a separate subpanel, and leave physical space for a changeover switch, even if you don't install it.

If the load is just refrigerators, gas furnace and a few lights, I would get a subpanel that supports a simple manual interlock, fit the generator-side breaker, and put all the loads on one pole. Then on the generator feed breaker, connect that pole to a 120V inlet socket. That would be cheap/easy. Then, with an extension cord and a small Honda generator, you could get critical loads lit without too much work. You don't want to have no protection at all while you decide on whether to commit to the expensive, complicated rigmarole of a whole-house generator setup.