Beware becoming "house poor," OP. Just because the bank says you can afford a house of a certain value, that doesn't mean you really can.
We were offered a loan about 1.75x as high as we could really afford. It disturbs me that the lender - who knew all of our income and expenses - thought we could afford that much house, when my wife and I knew full well we could not.
Consider that your monthly mortgage payment will be roughly 1% of the home's price, once you add in taxes, insurance, etc.
Great advice everyone, I have been away the past couple days working hard on the immigration process so that's been eating most all of my time...definitely have a lot to look into here, and will definitely be coming back to this thread with more questions as the time approaches.
Definitely some good advice in here, I've learned a lot since making this post over the past six months of researching the house purchasing process, and was actually meaning to bump it (thank sushi!), and rethought a few things, but I do need to go back through and read it all again.