Mom called at 5:02 - but that's just because I was on the phone before that and she couldn't get through.

I looked at a property on Friday that I had been meaning to go and see for a long time - it was a run down cottage on 25 acres right in Chatham VIllage. Will and Val came with me - they had contacted the realtor about that same property - Will being interested in having a retreat for musicians. It happens to almost touch their property on one side, with just RR tracks, a lot and a street in between. We all liked the property very much, it doesn't feel at all like you are in town and the Stony Kill runns through one side of it.

The price was a bit out of our range, so I didn't get too excited about it. I spoke to my pal at the toy store about it - he suggested a very low offer price. When I came home, Steve was home - I had forgotten that he was working a half day. Aidan was asleep in the car so we turned around to look at the house again. Steve checked out the structure more than I had. It will need a septic, but the foundation seems good. The house is very small, but there were things that we thought we could do to improve it. We were more detatched about it than usual - but I think that that was probably because it was out of our price range.

We almost didn't bid on it that day - but at about 5:00 the realtor called to see what we thought. Steve told her that we would think about it over the weekend and then suddenly changed his mind about half an hour later. He called her back and drove back to Chatham to her office to submit our ridiculously low offer.

We didn't talk about it much and I didn't mention it here because we'd made offers before and fully expected this one to not happen - we really couldn't afford his price and would have been shocked if he came down to our price. On Monday the realtor left a message that someone else had submitted a bid on the property that weekend. I spoke to her this morning to see if we could compete with the new bid and she told me that she couldn't tell me the bid amount - its against the law. I am going through all of this really blindly and was really shocked to hear that. Then, she sort of coached me toward what a competitive bid would be. So I spent a few minutes on the phone with her trying to estimate what the taxes on this property might be and then I called Steve to propose a monthly payment that would be a little higher than any we had paid before. We decided to go for it.

I thought that at that point the other bidder would be able to bid again. Turns out that's not the way it works. He gets one bid, we get two because we went first. Doesn't that seem like an important piece of information that your realtor should tell you about ahead of time? We almost didn't bid on Friday!

So now several things may happen - we may get the house and property no problemo. The owner could counter our offer at which point we would walk away because we already feel like we are over extending ourselves. We could find out upon inspection that the cottage has more problems than we think. The house may not be mortgagable for the proposed purchase price. This is the third offer we have made on something so I am trying not to daydream about the possibilities or get too excited about it.