First, owning a house or other building is NOT required to enjoy the game. It can be useful from a roleplay standpoint, and is very useful for storing additional items you may find when you run out of space in your bags.
Second, building a house is a lot of hard work, and this game makes no exception. You will need to know several gathering and crafting skills, and it may take a considerable amount of time to obtain enough materials to build a house, so be sure you are ready to invest the time and effort into it.
Third, owning a house is a privilege, not a right. If you are not willing to put in the effort to build it, then you probably don`t need to have it. Begging for someone to make a house is against chat rules, and there is currently no way to put up a job for a house. You can place an request in the Marketplace channel for one, but unless you have some money (I would say at least 1gp) and know exactly what kind of house you want, your request will most likely be ignored.
This help topic will explain, in detail, how to construct the house yourself. You will be responsible for determining which house you get, gathering the resources to construct it, and placing it in the world. The only outside help will be having someone create the deed, as the required construction skill is normally not available until level 95 (level 50 for Apprentices). This construction will be performed using the Craft Marketeer, which you use without assistance from other players.
Be prepared to invest at least an hour to build your first house from start to finish. If you have been playing for a while, this time may be less. Here are the steps required:
1. Determine the requirements for the house you want.
There are several things that help decide what kind of house you will build.
a. Do you need it to support shopkeepers immediately?
b. How many rooms do you want in your house?
c. Do you have a preference on what the house looks like?
2. Select a house.
Look at the available houses at Library > Buildings. Ignore the blue buildings, as they will not be useful until around level 250 (when automations are available). If you need a shopkeeper immediately, then the pink buildings will support one or more vendors in the entrance room (any building can have vendors by adding appropriate rooms to it. This help topic covers GETTING a house, not renovating it). The White buildings are also available, and are more general-purpose type buildings.
If the building`s appearance is important, look at the picture displayed next to each building. Unless you own a land tile, that is the image that will be displayed next to your building, so find an appearance that matches what you are looking for.
Clicking on any of the buildings will display the number of rooms (and, in the case of pink buildings, the number of vendors) it supports. Clicking the view button on the right will show the building layout. In the layout, clicking on any of the rooms will show what furnishings the room supports. Again, any building can eventually contain any type of room, but there are other help files for that.
Note that some buildings come with more rooms than the building can support (a Stone Guild House contains 13 rooms, though the building only supports 10), which is fine - you just won`t be able to expand it in the future. Other buildings come with only one room, even though it supports more (a Palace supports 50 rooms, but comes with 1). Building rooms is a more advanced topic covered in the “Building Renovation Guide” topic.
…continued in How do I get a house? (part 2 of 3)