1) Houses are fairly expensive, starting in the 40,000 - 50,000 gold range. Houses are not plentiful. Depending on who you ask, there's either a shortage of housing or an over-abundance. Most houses are large enough to share comfortably between 2 or more people. My personal advice is: don't be in a hurry to buy a house.
Regarding the insides: You can't "build" it to suit, but we have a very flexible furniture deed system that lets you place furniture and other items wherever you wish them to be.
2) When you first create your character, you really shouldn't have much in your inventory anyway. What you get when you first log in are some very basic things. Some of these things are tools for your PC to use while playing, while others are used for record-keeping, retrieval, saving your character, etc. Typically, you should only have some basic equipment some custom tools and some gold. You're probably fine the way you are.
3) That depends on what the items are. If you're confused, I'd ask in the forums. If you ask someone in-game what your dicebag is for, they should give you an odd look. That goes double for the emote wand. If you happen to ask about something on the forums that is better asked about in-game, then most times people will tell you to ask in-game. We don't like to give away too much here in the forums, because it ruins the fun of RPing and discovering these things yourself.
