Home is Where the Heart is...If Someone Will Actually Sell Us Their Home!

We've been searching for a home for the past four months. We've made two offers, one was accepted, but it was a short sale and there were inherent problems with the listing. The second offer (remember this one), for a home that we both adore, we believe was never even presented to the sellers by the agent. We were not even given a counteroffer and the agent was so brazen about the whole thing that she actually wrote an e-mail insulting me and my husband personally, not just our offer.
I spend at least one hour a day looking for homes online. I think that I've looked at 30 houses to date. I know every home in a mile radius of our target neighborhood. I feel like I'm moonlighting as a realtor and after our interactions with most of them I am fairly confident that I'm more knowledgeable than most of them. I'm exhausted and frustrated and we haven't even had the stress of getting to the closing table. After touring three houses this weekend, we actually liked one of the homes we saw and before we had a chance to mull it over, we saw that the home had gone under contract five hours later. Let me repeat, we saw this house at 12pm. We went back to look at it online at 9pm and it was under contract. This is the biggest purchase of our lives and we are just innocent bystanders in the process. Anyone who knows me should know I have a hard time waiting in the sidelines.

I'm not sure if it was the hysteria of house hunting gone awry yesterday, but my husband and I decided to take matters into our own hands. We wrote a letter (HINT: on beautiful stationary with a matching envelope) to the owners who unfortunately had to relocate out of state, which is what prompted them to put their home on the market. It was a well written letter, I believe, and being that we've thought about this house for three months we figured what did we have to lose? For the first time in four months of this arduous process I feel like I've actually done something. We will hopefully receive something back from them and if/when we do all of you will be the first to know. Please keep all your fingers crossed for us.