Need some BIKE help and 2nd hand buy help (so I need help from Dana and Bas :)

Hmmm I continously damage my Omafiets with the way I bike (Jumping off curbs, biking through all sorts of crappy weather, going way too fast) which resulted in the frame getting really crooked (Dana, you saw how it bends to the left... heh) and the chain breaking once. Whereas it got repaired less than a month ago it's lose again and beating against the chain-covernig and will be only a matter of time before it breaks again...

So, since I love my Omafiets I was thinking about, once we get the house and hence more room, to get a second bike, which I use to bike to work. I'd still use the Omafiets for the normal trips to anywhere in the city or to the beach or whatever, but if I keep this up (it's been a year of every-day usage of over 30km per day) I'll wreck my bike for sure and since I got it sort of as a present from my grandparents (my grand-dad who passed away a year ago) I don't want to lose it.

Naturally I would not buy a brand-new bike in a store. That's a waste of money. So I looked at speurders.nl, a 2nd hand market for the Netherlands, and I checked out prices of bikes and I was very surprised. I'm thinking of getting a mountain-bike for the "biking to work"-part, since it can take way more beating and it has gears and good brakes (on the omafiets, when the chain breaks you also don't have brakes anymore and that's scary when you are going downhill...). So anyways. Most mountainbikes, with shimanos, 26", and those springs are under 200 Euros! I don't get it. Look here for example. That one is such a funky cool bike and it's 180 Euros! And it even says it is brand-new. I thought, well that's very fishy, but then I looked around and all these kind of bikes are that much. What's wrong? Well I have no knowledge of bikes, least of all mountainbikes. So Dana, what do you think of those bikes? And Bas, how safe is the whole "buying things 2nd hand on the internet"-thing? I just have no idea whatsoever.

The house thing btw is becoming more and more reality. The bank said OK to our financial papers and now all we have to wait for is the life-insurance since that is a different department. I don't suspect anything going wrong there since we're both healthy, never had anything weird, don't do extreme sports and don't have anything strange in our families, well health-wise at least, haha.

So I guess I can carefully say it's going to work out... although in the back of my mind I still have doubts and there is still the one little thing that is not final yet and eventhough my brain says, nothing can go wrong now and the hardest part, the money part, is fine etc. Nevertheless I'm still not sure if I can afford being overly happy already... oh well... I guess that will come. However, regardless whether the insurance thing gets done my Friday or not, we won't say no to the house anymore which means that if all goes well we'll get the house, and if for whatever reason the insurance won't go through (which is even more unlikely than George W. Bush to signing the Kyoto Protocol) then we'll be stuck with paying 10% of the sale-price and not getting the house. But let's hope that's not going to happen. :) So Dana, keep collecting bananaboxes! :D