As a rule, I only store things in the obvious player homes, anything else, I'm not really confident is safe. So naturally, my inventory suddenly lightened a lot by the time I had an actual home. Fortunately, since I had found and fixed up ED-E, I had somewhere to store anything I couldn't carry until then. Companions still make good pack mules, at least
Sleeping isn't too much of a problem, though (Not that you even need to sleep unless you use hardcoe mode. Sure, sleeping in a bed that belongs to you gives you a temporary boost to experience, but it seems to be that leveling is easy enough without that.) since one can often find usable beds in the random shacks, camps, or raider hideouts in the wasteland. And the game tells you which beds are owned by default, but even if it didn't, you'd know if a bed you tried to sleep in was owned by someone else because the game just won't let you do it at all.
That is just cheating. Why don't you type in the correct console code and jack all your stats while you are at it?
So getting a house before reaching Novac is cheating? That makes no sense, it's not like having a house gives you an advantage in combat. It just gives you a place to put your possessions that you don't want to use now and provides a bed you can reach any time, which mostly makes things more convenient rather than that much easier.
And really, it seemed a rather bizarre choice to not put a real player home somewhere earlier in the game. I mean, in Fallout 3, you could get a house for completing a quest that you get in what's quite likely to be the first place you visit after leaving the vault. And while the house you get is different depending on how you choose to complete the quest, either option can be performed easily enough quite early on. And it's not like the early game housing options would need to be something fancy, I wouldn't have objected to having just a small shack in good springs with a bed to sleep in and some space to stash my loot before I can move on to something more desirable.
The game as designed encourages some risk, exploration, and creative thinking. I'd hate to lose that.
The game should involve some risk, but that's supposed to come from getting killed in combat, losing all your caps in a casino, and things like that, not your loot magically vanishing from where you left it due to gameplay mechanics even though no one is around who could have taken it.