I'm not going to touch the other thread I had started a few days ago. Some people really took that too far. For everyone who kept their head and offered good advice, I really appreciate it.

Long story short, I got the bike back. To do that, I had to take a trip up north for a few days, sorry to keep everyone hanging.

All and all in was anti-climatic. I showed up to the sellers house with two friends, he seemed like a relatively nice, reasonable guy. We looked over the bike and talked about it for a bit.

After his sales pitch I asked him what he was doing with such a small road bike (it looked like he would've riden something around 56-58cm, this was 47cm). He got a little uncomfortable and hesitated... then I told him that the frame had been taken from my apartment during a party a couple weeks ago.

When I said this his face turned white. Looking pretty embarrassed and sort of intimidated he explained that it was one of his friends who had taken the bike to ride back home because he was drunk and the buses had stopped running. He had, in turn, been offered the bike to fix up and sell.

Was his story convincing? Well, theres no knowing if he was being honest, but that was good enough for me.

After some discussion he offered to let me take the bike, minus the new wheelset, for free. I asked him if he had the original parts from the bike... turns out he did. So he brought out a cardboard box and in 20 minutes we swapped out most of the new parts (seat, stem, handlebars) for their older counterparts.

So all and all things turned out just fine.