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The words "utility function" here are usually used in two quite different meanings.
In meaning 1 they are specific and refer to the VNM utility function which gjm talked about. However, as he correctly mentioned, "humans certainly don't behave exactly as if we have utility functions, at least not sensible ones". Note: specifically VNM utility functions.
In meaning 2 these words are non-specific and refer to an abstract concept of that what you would want and would choose if given the opportunity. For example if you want to talk about incentives but do not care about what precisely would incentivise an agent, you might abstract his actual desires out of the picture and talk about his utility in general. This utility is not the VNM utility. It's just a convenient placeholder, a variable that we (usually) do not need the value of.
nothing I've read seems to hold up when I try to apply it to a concrete use case.
That's because humans don't have VNM utility functions and even if they did, you wouldn't be able to calculate your own on the fly.
trying to build a utility TABLE for major, point-in-time life decisions
What would it look like?
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What do you mean "cheat"? Presumably you want to buy a house you like, not just the one that checks the most boxes in a spreadsheet.
That doesn't look like a reasonable procedure to me. So whether a house has exterior steps gets to be as important as the price? One of the reasons such utility tables have limited utility is precisely the weights. They are hard to specify but naive approaches like making everything equal-weighted don't look to lead to good outcomes.
Effectively you need to figure out the trade-offs involved (e.g. "am I willing to pay $20K more for a bigger yard? How about $40K?") and equal weights for ranks are rather unhelpful.
I agree that making a list of things you need and value in a house is a very useful exercise. But you can't get to the level of completeness needed to make the whole thing work the way you want it to work. You mention updating this table on the basis of your perceptions and experience, but if your ranks are equal-weighted anyway, what do you update?
With respect to the houses serially appearing before you, a simplified abstraction of this problem has an optimal solution.
Thanks much for the link to the Secretary Problem solution. That's will serve perfectly. Even if I don't know the total number of houses that will be candidates for serious consideration, I do know there's an average, which is (IIRC) six houses visited before a purchase.
As for cheating ... what I mean by that is deluding myself about some aspects of the property I'm looking at so that I believe "this is the one" and make an offer just to stop the emotional turmoil of changing homes and spending a zillion dollars that I don't happen to possess. "Home sweet home" and "escape the evil debt trap" are memes at war in my head, and I will do things like hallucinate room dimensions that accommodate my furniture rather than admit to myself that an otherwise workable floor plan in a newly gutted and beautifully renovated yet affordable home is too dang small and located in a declining neighborhood. I take a tape measure and grid paper with me to balk the room size cheat. But I also refer to the table, which requires me to check for FEMA flood zone location. This particular candidate home was in a FEMA 100-year flood zone, and the then-undeveloped site had in fact been flooded in 1952. That fact was enough to snap me out of my delusion. At that point the condition of the neighboring homes became salient.
The extent to which self-delusion and trickery are entwined in everyday thought is terribly disheartening, if you want to know the truth.
On weighting my functional criteria based on dollars, the real estate market has worked out a marvelous short circuit for rationality. Houses are no longer assessed for value based on an individual home's actual functional specifications. The quantity of land matters (so yard size matters to price). Otherwise, overwhelmingly, residential properties are valued for sale and for mortgages based on recent sales of "comparable" homes. "Comparable" means "the same square footage & same number of bedrooms and baths within half of mile of your candidate home." The two homes can otherwise be completely dissimilar, but will nevertheless be considered "comparable". No amount of improvements to the house or yard will change the most recent sale price of the other homes in the neighborhood. What this means is that sales prices are just for generic shelter plus the land, where the land is most of the value and neighborhood location is most of the land value. So the price of the home you're looking at is not really very closely tied to anything you might value about the home. This makes it very difficult to come up with a reasonable market price for, say, an indoor laundry versus laundry facilities in the garage. It's certainly beyond my meager capacity to calibrate the value of home amenities based on dollars.
I'm told it wasn't this way in the 1950s, but given the history of land scams in the U.S., which go all the way back to colonial land scams in Virginia, I have my doubts that prices for real estate were ever rational.
But I'll try to find something for weights. Back to the drawing board. And thanks for your help.