Free Company housing is coming out later this year, and personal housing sometime after that.

Crafting: If you're going to get into crafting, it's a good idea to begin it relatively early, so you can make your own gear as you level up. Besides which, it takes a lot of time to level crafting, and is more fun if you're alternating it with leveling your adventuring classes rather than just doing one or the other continuously for that long. I do, however, suggest waiting until you complete the main storyline quest Scions of the Seventh Dawn, which unlocks the use of retainers, before getting too deeply into crafting. (It's ostensibly level 17, but most people seem to be a bit above that before getting to it.) You can begin the crafting classes and do a little with them before that, but if you try doing a lot, you're going to have problems with running out of inventory space. Once you have retainers to hold your excess ingredients and sell any extra stuff you make that you don't want yourself, that's when you can start focusing more energy into crafting.