I just found that in 3e, house rules were far more problematic than not. Usually, you'd see someone trying to "fix" a problem with a house rule and it turned out, more often than not, that the person didn't actually know the actual rule in the first place. So, the fix was generally worse than the problem. And then you'd see all sorts of "Oh, 3e is borken" type threads on various forums, when, in reality, the problem was far more often user error.
We ran 3e almost entirely by the book. Heck, trying to get my players to use stuff that wasn't WotC sanctioned was always a challenge. I loved using d20 stuff, but, my players would very rarely stray from official books.