When we bought our house together DP and I had our list of 'essential must haves'. These are the things that we had to have in order to seriously look at putting an offer in. They were, to us, the big things. I needed 2 living areas and DP needed a double garage and a big shed. We looked at lots of houses for a long, long time until we found what we were after, everything else besides those 3 things we would easily compromise on.