Depending on your funding (cash reserves, equity, financing, etc) and your future plans, both methods are great.

Will a hard money loan let me rehab the home or how could I go about getting the funds to rehab it?

It seems if you build it out into a proper modern small set of apartments, you can avoid any big maintenance issues for a long time, as well as making something highly desirable/and therefore priced accordingly. 

I think if people have the money and desire that might be a good fit for some.

My question is more to the closing options in MN that has been suggested from differing answers that range from doing a simultaneous or double close to providing transactional funding or selling a LLC or Land Trust.

In order to get the down payment funds, I will take a loan out of 10k, which will give me a 176 monthly payment for 60 months (5 yrs).

Yep, there are definitely outfits that do that--you fund the rehab, have to wait for it, then wait for tenants, never mind the much increased risk in doing it that way--but there are plenty who do it how you want them to.

Researching markets, fostering relationships with brokers, finding and vetting deals, obtaining experience, raising capital, arranging bank funding, vetting management companies...the list goes on...is hard work; so, the deal structure is set up so that the sponsor gets compensated for that work with a 70/30 split rather than proportional.  

I'm looking to learn a lot about selecting properties, estimating repair costs, minimizing tax impact (using retirement funds), estimating repaired resale value and another topics I come across that I need to know about before jumping in.

Any recommendations on good funding options for a beginner?