So im having a lot of trouble finding a good, flat spot for a house and i was starting to think maby its best to edit the land to make a spot for it

Most of the time, even if you find a nice flat spot, you'll have to make minor edits to the landscape and foliage placed by the devs. If you want a great tutorial check out TESA, Lesson 3 deals with exteriors:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/114-creation-kit-basics/

The biggest problem I've found with putting a house outside has been with the navmesh, it's just makes a mess seems like (because I haven't learned enough about the navmesh yet, in Oblivion it was so easy!). I would try to alter the existing ground as little as possible, but yes you can definitely flatten out any piece of land you want using the landscape editor.

A good rule of thumb: if you come across a vanilla tree or rock etc you want to delete...DON'T. Instead set it as "initially disabled" and move it out of your way.

I'm not too sure of the technical reason behind it to tell you the truth, just one of the habits I've picked up from this forum.

- Hypno