HOUSE HUNTER Estate agents speak the truth, as we discovered after a game of hardball over our dream house, writes DON MORGAN.

‘IF YOU have a higher offer, take it with both hands. We won’t go any higher.” My wife was playing hardball on the phone with an estate agent. I, like all good cowards, was hiding behind the couch.

We’ve never played hardball before and you could cut the atmosphere with pretty much anything, no knives required.

The tiny voice on the phone responded without emotion: “That’s all I needed to know.” Click.

What did that mean? What’s all he needed to know? Did we have the house or not? So while our friend at the estate agency was doing his best impression of the Riddler, we had a weekend of living in limbo – we could go higher, but how could we justify it?

Especially having researched what it would cost to put the house right, with new windows, insulation, heating, the works.

We were sticking to our initial offer. It was still the guts of €500,000. It was the first offer we’d made that wasn’t laughed at outright. Until we viewed this particular house, we’d felt pretty intimidated by either the house or the angry looking, pin-striped men who greeted us.

We work in Monkstown. We want a house that’s preferably within an ass’s roar of our employer.

This house was in Blackrock, Monkstown’s louder Siamese twin.

It’s also the first house we loved and lost, entwined forever in “our story” as my romantic missus would put it. “The Dream House”, to be pronounced as if possessed by Bill Cullen ossified on absinthe, was a wreck: a shabby chic semi-d, busy road out front, no electricity, gas or heating.

Windows held together with rust and pixie dust. Cables streaming out of the chimney like the tentacles of the Cracken consuming a ship.

Yet our alternative lifestyle was clear to see. You could walk to work, take the Dart places or rock up after a few scoops in O’Rourkes with all the other golf sweaters.

To live, perchance to talk utter rubbish watching the Masters. Bliss!

It had gorgeous period quirks as well, not because of some design über-dude, but because of the last, aged occupant: the mad wooden bench in a ground floor alcove looked like Gaudi had whittled something with a spare bit of two-by-four.

We practically moved into it after one viewing. After a long day at work, having forgotten we had booked ourselves in for the viewing, it was love at first sight.

We knew where we were going to put things, who would come visit, the colour of the bathroom and where our as yet non-existent children would go to school. It was also the first time we really had fun on a viewing.

Reality, however, has this annoying tendency to intervene. We got it wrong, big time and were inconsolable. As real as it had felt, there was the small detail of buying the damned house.

When we made our offer, we thought the agent was bluffing: there couldn’t be another offer, surely. Who the hell would have money in this day and age?

There was indeed another offer, pure and simple. We were just too mistrusting and nervous as hell to realise that, so didn’t get it. Hardball game over.

Another estate agent summed it up best for us at a later viewing elsewhere: buying a house is one of the three most emotional things you’ll ever do in life, which we appreciate now.

We didn’t expect it then to have the impact on us that it did. After all, aren’t you just buying a house? We were nonetheless upset for the life we saw.

Potentially seeing our humdrum existence, possibly cycling to work, our children’s speculative first day at school or their hypothetical first trip to Wes on a Friday night and the inevitable trip to Vincent’s afterwards.

We also made the rookie mistake of having our heads filled to the brim with tales of tricky estate agents looking to squeeze a few extra shekels out of gullible buyers, regardless of inconveniences like telling the truth.

You end up parsing each phrase with more care than a diplomat in the Middle East. Well, that one we misread. Estate agents are honest. Damn.