Finding the House of our dreams

After deciding to search for a house together in January 2009, this was the first one we looked at. We thought we could pick it up for a song since it was in substantial disrepair and had all the modern features of the house on “The Brady Bunch”.
The house was built in 1969 and did not appear to have been updated since. It had a funky smell and the dark cabinets and retro fixtures reminded me of my youth. The bathroom was horrible with tiny ceramic tiles of tan and brown, you'll see them in a later post.
Well, we paid more than we expected, but the house was located in a remote wooded area with two acres of land and a built in pool. One neighbor is visible from the house but the summer foliage will cover that with no problem.
The outside was in desperate need of paint, everything needed work from top to bottom. There was potential here and we were convinced we could do it.
The owner informed us that all the renovations we wanted were cosmetic (HA!) and refused to mitigate the price. "besides," we were informed by the seller's realtor, "there is a buyer who keeps making offers higher than yours." (We suspected later that this was a lie to either hasten dumping the house on us or keeping us from buying it all together). Our Realtor showed us many other houses, but we kept comparing all others to this one. Finally, we decided to stop kidding ourselves and ante up. We made an offer only $10.000 less than the asking price.