Order of Events

A few people have voiced their concern about the order in which things have been done in the process of buying this house. Specifically related to the home inspection and signing the contract. For the most part, they said I should have had the home inspected before I signed the contract to buy the house.
It makes sense that you don't want to commit to buying a house without knowing the house isn't in really bad shape and need a ton of repairs. It's good to know that you'll be buying a quality home.
The thing is, the contract itself stipulated that I had 10 days from the date it was signed that I could cancel it for any reason. That gave me the ability to lock in the home, keeping another from buying it before me, and the time I needed to get the home inspected, making sure that the house was something I actually wanted to buy.
I'm fairly sure this is a common thing, possibly even a state requirement, when buying a house. Everyone I've asked about it at least followed the same procedure as I did, putting in an offer, then having the home inspected after. With the 10 day window at the beginning of the contract to cancel for any reason, I felt confident in signing the contract before having the home professionally inspected.
Now, this is also the reason I was stressing so hard earlier. I only had a 10 day window to figure out everything. I had to know that there wouldn't be any major hurdles to buying the house, and if there were, I'd need to know right away. So I made sure I got all my paperwork into the lender right away, made sure I got the inspection done, made sure I could get insurance. Any one of those things going wrong could have meant I wouldn't be able to close on the house and if it happened after that 10 day window, bad things would happen.
At this point, I'm sure there's going to be more to stress over, there will be more things that pop up that I'll need to deal with. But right now, I've done everything I can do to make sure it all goes as smoothly as possible, and I'll have to deal with anything else as it comes along.

Don't count your chicken's before they're hatched

So my realtor called me today. It seems that someone else put an offer in on the house too. Unfortunately, there's no way to know what the offer was, but I had the option to either leave my offer as it is, revoke my offer, or change it.
I'm really new to this whole thing, so I don't know what to expect from a competing offer. I chose to ask my agent what they though, and she said I should increase my offer by $2,500. It didn't take me long to decide to do that. Even if she had said $5,000 I probably would have, but much more than that, and I might have decided to just keep looking.
The house is great, and even at the revised $77.5k it's still a steal. But I'm not going to get my hopes up and get attached to a house until it's closed. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong to keep a sale from going through, and I am a realist.
So, according to my agent, we will know tomorrow if my offer is accepted, and until then, I can only hope. But it won't be the end of the world if I have to keep looking, I'm certain the right house is out there just waiting for me, even if it takes a few tries.