I am constantly battling my personal checklist vs a purely investment driven checklist for my next property since I plan to live in it before making it a rental. 

Because from all those possible hundreds of flavors of real estate, your letter implies (at least to me) that you are really only interested in one flavor out of all those potential options: the distressed seller with a rundown property who is motivated purely by numbers, where your goal is to help them in a way that can get you the lowest price possible, and then resell it at the highest price possible.

@Jaron Walling the example was purely hypothetical just to make the numbers a little clear and easier.

While I'm purely in the thought exercise mode right now, I'd like to delve a little deeper and explore how to structure a deal like this.

If you are purely betting on continued appreciation - that is a different song & dance.

Hence I'm starting to look further out of state as a pure rental play.

Try the following structure: 10% of equity; 40% of mez and you're getting a pure construction loan at quite affordable rates.

The sale is already done and the redemption is purely one last ditch effort/opportunity to take the property back from the foreclosing entity/buyer for the amount that it was foreclosed on and nothing less.

I strongly agree that the expense in time, gas, and maintenance will far outweigh the advantages of owning the property that you would be much better living on base, if possible, or renting as cheaply as possible until you have the money saved to buy a property purely as an investment property.

I say this because your job is probably too small to warrant the extra expense of hiring a GC who is purely a project coordinator/manager.