The lender is likely not a professional lender and the borrower should absolutely be thinking about protecting the lender.For a Hard Money Lender, they will worry about protecting themselves which also provides a number of safeguards for the borrower because that is their job and profession. 

The issue we had was they were very sensitive to having repair people in.

I would prevent downside scenarios by running sensitivity analyses on my financial model.

These outages would be much more detrimental if the VA was doing time-sensitive work, like front-line for property management. 

He also acts as the safeguard during the rehab by checking the work completion level and quality for me.

Professional, experienced, critical eyes reviewing the deal and actually provide additional borrower safeguards to mitigate certain pitfalls2.

If we're working something that's a sensitive deal, we won't take it to people that we don't already know and trust in effort to keep that from happening.It's also pretty time efficient because we have a template we've created that we can use for any deal. 

For new investors, or OOA investors, this is your safe guard that you are not buying a disaster house.

I think sellers really respect it when I say to them, "I want to be sensitive to your situation, but in order for me to figure out how I can help you best, it'd be helpful for me to hear a little bit more about what caused you to get behind in payments."

If the answer is anything greater than "Zero", do you think you might consider taking ownership of the situation and revising your screening and renting policies to better safeguard your assets?