Otis, your story reminded me of a similar one:
A buddy of mine and I are delivering phone books around Boulder, CO in 1985. We were into various little Italian buzzboxes at the time, so this explains why he arrives at lunch panting like a horny dog because he had found an Alfa 101 Giulietta Spider Veloce moldering next to a house in town. It's rusty as hell, but complete except for the Veloce oil pan.
So we go ask the guy-- who was actually quite approachable and receptive-- about it, and he says $200'll take it. A lot of money at the time, but what the heck.
After a month or so, when we still hadn't gotten the cash together, he goes and checks on the car, and the guy-- Richard, I think his name was-- says he'll take $100.
Same process repeats, we go to talk to Richard, and Mark comes out of the house grinning ear to ear, and whispers to me that it's ours for the taking if we can haul it off. We both felt like we had won the lottery, and hatched one pie-in-the-sky plan after the other about restoring it.
After dragging it to his house on a borrowed trailer behind a borrowed FJ40, and dealing with his parents' vociferous objections, we started work on it, work which was never finished and gradually ground to a halt in the late 90's-- long after I had moved away from Boulder.
Last I heard, it and its attendant assemblage of goodies had been sold off, far less complete and drivable than when we had started. Had we left it alone or completed it (obviously), it would have been much better off, and much less likely to end up parted out or scrapped.