basically, i through a load of my crud on the floor in a house once when i was over encumbered, assuming it owuld disapear becasue thats what i thought happend, however. I went back about 2 game weeks later and it was still there :/? I loved on morrowind how oyu could just hijack a home, it allowed for amazing RP!.

What are the rules in skyrim? help?

Also a list of any safe locations that arent buyable houses would be good (If any)

Items will eventually disappear unless they are in a special chest or a container which does not respawn, such as the ones in player houses

Yes, the little booklet that came with the game said you cannot store items in any container you don't technically own, or it may not be there when you come back. Safest bet is to have a home somewhere, or just sell as much as you can. The first home in Whiterun isn't too difficult to come by, and I think it also comes with basic storage, even without furnishing it. And, I do believe all containers in your home are unlimited storage, so you never have to worry about running out of space. But, be careful about just putting armor or items on the floor in your home, because your housecarl may ask if he/she can have the items. You do have the option to say no, but it might be safe to store them anyhow.

Also, as another note, I believe you can store items in guild areas when you become a member and so on. I am not positive on how it works everywhere, but it's an easier, and cheaper, way to store items without actually purchasing a home. I'm not sure if it's entirely more efficient, but it is another option.

The containers may have unlimited storage (where the real limit is probably a big number like 65536), but if you put a few dozen things in one the UI won't display them all until some are removed. I need to test this precisely some time. It became so annoying I was motivated to buy more property so I could store things in different places.

Yeah, but you know, like the OP asked, what are the actual rules?

I'm also wondering...do you "own" the storage containers in married wives homes or in

Depends on whether the cell or container will reset or not.

Your houses never reset, so it's safe to drop all your items on the floor or put them into a chest in your house.

It completely depends on the cell you are in respawning or not.

As a general rule, any place you got by buying a house will not respawn, so your items will stick around.

Everything else, not. Unless it's specifically stated that the place is your own as a reward for something.

so the will stick around, but items Ysolda's house will disappear, even if i am married to her and moved in with her?

You can try it by yourself.
Save the game.

Drop something on the floor or in the chest in Ysolda's house.
Go to another house(preferably in another city) and wait/sleep for 3 to 7 days.
Go back and see if your items are still there or not.
It's fairly easy and quick to test.

I know that some containers do reset. For example, there's a barrel in the courtyard of the College of Winterhold that I use to store dragon bones and scales whenever a dragon comes and attacks but I don't have any more space in my inventory. Then I quickly go home, store some of my inventory, and come back and get everything from the barrel. After a certain length of time, the barrel goes from being empty to having the default food in it again.

But, not all containers in the game do this. In fact before I decided to get my first house at level 40 or so, I had been using http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Mistwatch to store my items for almost all of the levels before that. I chose it because it was one of the few areas labeled as cleared when I was looking for a place to stay early on in the game. I know people on the forum have said that enemies respawn in cleared dungeons after an in-game month or so, but none ever respawned in all that time. And no items in any of the containers ever disappeared.

I have left items in a non-cleared dungeon before, and came back to discover that all the enemies had quickly respawned in the time it took to fast travel to my home to store some of my inventory. But even though the enemies respawned, all my items were fine.

So, basically just go and test the containers in a dungeon you want to live in before actually living there. It definitely is not like Oblivion where there are absolutely no safe containers in the world other than the ones in your house. It seems to be more like Fallout 3, from my experience, in that more often than not a container is safe to use.