No worries Longwaytogo, we all started out with no experience. This will become easier as you get more experience and comfort with it.
I agree on the auto-escalation clause: No way.
Putting a time constraint on a contract may be a regional thing. Good for you for insisting on it either way. One thing you'll learn is that real estate agents always want to do things as smoothly and easily for them as they can, and they are not lawyers (usually). If you continue to use agents, it won't be unusual at all for you to insist on doing things that they will claim are unusual or unorthodox, but you should insist on them nonetheless.
I'm not a house flipper, so I don't recall the target investment amount flippers typically look for, but I think the target is probably a maximum of somewhere around 70% (someone with experience please feel free to jump in and correct here as needed). That is, someone flipping a house for business/profit would expect a final sale price that puts their total investment amount at 70% of the sale price. So, if I thought I could buy, fix up, and sell a house for $100k, I would expect to put no more than $70k of my own funds into the purchase, materials, labor, carrying costs, financing, etc. Then of course there are transaction costs at both ends. That assumes you are hiring the labor -- since you are planning to do some or all of the labor yourself, you would be looking for an even larger margin (like 50%, perhaps).
So, yes, it appears you may be treating it more as a hobby/learning experience. If you are putting $75k of your own money PLUS labor into a $110k house, you might be closer to 90-100% invested. That's okay, but lots of folks (myself included) would never invest that kind of money, time, and energy into such a low expected gain. Might as well just be a contractor and earn that $20/hour on someone else's investment risk, or just buy a Vanguard fund and forget about it.
I'm definitely not trying to discourage you, and I doubt Arebelspy is either -- probably the opposite. I think you're setting your sights/expectations too low, and should seek out a deal where you will be at that 70% MAXIMUM, with no labor on your part. Or if you want to do the labor, maybe 40-50%. This will give you some wiggle room when things go bad (which they will, there's almost always something that comes up), and hopefully a decent profit margin that makes your effort worth it.
That means paying bottom dollar for the house; minimizing or eliminating transaction , financing, labor, and construction costs; researching your property carefully; having your legal representation, insurance, and personal liability ducks in a row; investing minimally to fix it up and only in ways that return profit; and lots of other things. Maybe do a little more research and figure out what you hope to get out of it??? But for me, I wouldn't put any more than $75k TOTAL into a house that I expected to sell for $110k, and that would be without me ever lifting a hammer.
You won't like it when you realize, as you're on your 1000th hour ripping out toilets, floors, drywall, that your real estate agent made as much on the deal as you! So don't be discouraged, maybe just set the bar much higher and see if you can get that 30+% return, instead of 10% AND busting your ass in construction. Good luck!