OMG that's how I feel about my new apartment. I own nothing in the apartment I share with two other people, and everytime I touch anything, I think, hmm, gonna need to buy one of those.

Mmm...love the exterior stonework. Pretty.

Also, yay! Ikea trip!

Really nice. The upstairs gameroom looks interesting. I like the built-in space for the entertainment center, and the generous amount of outlets.

iconomy, I'm going to have outlets coming out of my ass. The built-in entertainment nook thing has four outlets, two cable jacks, and two cat-5 jacks.

Oh, and congratulations and good luck! Buying a home is so exciting.

About the outlets - better too many than not enough! Our house is from 1917 and the dining room only has one outlet in it, and the living room has the outlets on the floor instead of on the walls, and in our bedroom the outlets are level with my face instead of down by the baseboard. Old houses are so weird. Oh I mean loaded with quirky charm. Yep that's what I meant.

Yes, the more outlets the better. When Fog Creek Software's built a new office, they installed 20 outlets per office. Nerds are awesome.

Gawd, I always get really jealous when I see how much house you get for your money in the US. In this part of Essex that'd be a $2 million house. But we don't have palmetto bugs, so there's always a plus.

Absolutely gorgeous! And I like the colors, too. Bright and open, that's a big plus. Congratulations!

Nice place. I don't know how much you paid for it, but that would be about a AU$500k house here, depending on the position.

Absolutely you cannot have too many power outlets - when we built our current house (which we just sold), we had to pay double for power outlets because we added so many, but a week after we moved in, we had to add another. Ditto with Cat5 outlets - despite at least two in every room, we had to add one when we added the power point. When we build our new house, it will have at least twice as many of both (including quad outlets in the bedrooms, living areas and kitchen), plus wi-fi and audio cables to every room from the media cupboard.

essexjan and dj, I'm fortunate that I won't be paying anywhere near either of those figures. Housing prices in Houston, especially outside the near-downtown area, are quite reasonable. On top of that, the builder was eager to move the house, and cut me a pretty good deal.

I am glad to have so many outlets, particularly in the kitchen, where I find you simply can't have too many. The cat-5 will be nice too, though I expect to set up a wireless network promptly.

Congrats, man!

Is that a grow room?

And also: our 1950 house has about one outlet per room, so yeah, be glad you and yours won't die in the extension-cord-related conflagration that is probably our fate.

You know, when I first saw Iconomy's reference to outlets, I chuckled. Because I looked at brainwidth's pictures and outlets were the last thing I would ever notice. But after all this outlet talk, I have to jump on the bandwagon. My house has precious few, and the only 3-pronged outlet is in the garage, and that's because it's the 220v dryer hookup. So I have to use adaptors, which aren't all that safe. So yeah, outlets are good.

I'm going to have outlets coming out of my ass.

How convenient! You can integrate a plug into the seat of your Prius, and never have to use gasoline again!