3 BR Col., LR w/FP, DR, 2.5 bth, Modern EIK, CAC?
Houses in the New Jersey area (also valid for the rest of the USA) are somewhat different from what we're used to in Europe. First of all, the size of a house is given by the number of bedrooms, meaning: rooms that could potentially be used as bedroom. This is done, because all the other rooms are more or less standard in a US house. You will see advertisements for 2 BR houses, for example, while in Europe you would see a reference to the total number of rooms: probably 5 in this case.
In the European terminology, kitchens, attic rooms,
etc. are not part of the room indication. In the US equivalent, they often are.
Standard in an average X bedroom house are kitchen, family room, living room,
at least 2 bathrooms, and usually a basement.
The living room and the family room are things you may still remember from the
past in Europe, where a house would have a room where the family would eat and
play, and another room that is untouched most of the time and is meant for special
occasions: The 'formal' room. This tradition is also in place in NJ. Do not
expect the word 'bathroom' to mean that that room will have a bath. The word
'bathroom' is just a polite American word to indicate the toilet (or water closet,
or loo). A 2.5 bathroom house will probably have one 'real' bathroom, a room
with a shower, and a room with just a toilet.
Your ideal house may very well be listed as above. The translation: Colonial style house with 3 bedrooms, a living room with fireplace, a dining room, 2 rooms with bath/shower and one room with toilet only, a modern eat-in kitchen, and central air conditioning.
Electricity
Electricity in the US
is 110V AC, 60 Hz. Your home-country may have 220-240V AC with 50 Hz cycles.
Plugs will likely be different too. Realize that in the US, all electricity
outlets, plugs, covers, etc. have been standardized. It is a great experience
to be able to go to a store like Home Depot and find fifty different varieties
of outlets that all fit your house the same way. The only thing you need to
do is convert US power into your home-country power.
Let's start with the easy part: Converting US electricity into 220V. There are multiple larger electronics stores that sell transformers (step-up/step-down) to transform 110V into 220. An example is Lashen electronics. Once you arrive at the 220-240 V level, you can connect your home electric cables and equipment, provided that they fit within the power budget, 60 Hz frequency range, and impedance load level of the transformer. If you want to use that terrific 220V hairdryer, make sure the transformer can handle the 800 to 1000Watt these things use. Some equipment, such as older alarm clocks or those really old vinyl record players, use the net frequency to synchronize. Using these in the US will mean that a day on the alarm clock will be gone in 19 hours and twelve minutes, and the artists playing on the vinyl record sound very much like they're in a hurry. Better leave these systems at home in the storage. Electric drills or other equipment with electro motors may demand an awful lot from your power transformer because of their impedance. Do not leave them on unattended. Your CD player, stereo set, electronic speakers, etc. will probably all work fine using the power converter. Some electronic equipment will allow you to select several voltages, so you may not even need a transformer for these.
A more technical trick can be done by people with detailed understanding of electronics, and will require you to use measuring systems. Many parts of the US have 110V electricity supplied to a house in two phases. The voltage at an outlet will be one "live" phase and a "ground" wire. In another part of the house, you will also find a zero or ground wire and another "live" wire, this time with different phase from the first one. This is done to make sure not all lights in your home go out when one of the main power lines fail (which happens quite often because nearly all homes are supplied via overhead wires). If one would measure the Voltage between the two "live" phases, one would measure a voltage close to 200V. By restructuring the electricity in specific parts of the house to use two "live" wires of different phase rather than one "live" and one "ground", you can actually use 220V electric systems without power convertors. You need to be very careful, however, in documenting which outlets you've changed to 200V and make sure only the "foreign" plugs will fit these outlets. Any US equipment you accidentally connect to a 220V outlet is almost sure to not survive this action, and it may show this with a great "bang" and fire. Also, if your 220V system would have a shortcircuit both your power phases will be lost and you're in the dark. Keep a battery powered lamp at hand for these events.
One absolutely prehistoric element
of US society is the washing machine. These basically consist of a dumb engine
and a clock that makes it rotate for 20 to 30 minutes without having any further
use. They get their water from the hot and cold water outlets of your water
heater/boiler, and have no temperature control or heating whatsoever. Result
is poor quality washing. If you have to live with a US washing machine you need
to realize that your clothes will wear substantially faster than you're used
to and that color disappears overnight. Modern washing detergents have been
temperature tuned to create the best possible effect at 40 or 60 degrees centigrade.
In one of those stone age machines this is impossible to obtain. I remember
I was astounded when I used our bulky US washing machine and found out it was
already done after 25 minutes. My European laundry "computer" would
have spent two hours carefully heating, rotating, pushing, and pulsating the
laundry to get perfect results.
The only solution is to bring your own favorite washing machine: One that heats
the water itself rather than relying on external water source, has multiple
sensors to control temperature so that the washing process is optimally done,
and that has sophisticated computer software allowing you to select the washing
cycle for different types of fabrics and colors. Taking your own washer is useful,
but a condition is that you will need to install it using the dual-phase electricity
option I sketched above. You should only do this when you're very familiar with
electricity and you're not the type to worry about the risk that an insurance
company may not pay out after they find that it was thanks to your lack of electricty
knowledge that the house burned down to the ground.
The second alternative is the easy way out: Adapt your system to the US power. Most electronics systems can be transferred to 110V power by setting a rotery-like switch at the back of the system. Other systems will work but at less power: If you plug in your West-European hairdryer into a US outlet it will continue to work, but only at 25% of the heat it produced at home. Modern equiment like computer laptops have power supplies that will accept anything from 80V up to 280V, so you don't need to anything for these systems except adding a new plug or buying a convertor plug.