Hard money for personal property..

[Timothy N.]

I've read some conflicting information I was hoping You guys could help me with...

I live in PA. I'm a subcontractor for a company who flips houses. I'm more on the construction side and less on the acquiring property and financing side. My wife and I are looking for our first home. Since I do not have 2 years of tax records, because I started my own business, we are going by my wife's finances. We want a fixer upper. Something we can make our own. It seems the houses in our market, at the top of our budget, still need updating. So we would pay full price just to redo almost everything. We've put a few offers on properties and always seem to get beat out by someone with cash. 

So, I'm trying to get creative on purchasing a property for ourselves. My plan is to use hard money to get a property at an auction or off market. We would rehab the house. Then use a home equity line of credit to pay off the hard money loan. If it's the right house, we could be in it forever. But likely we would sell it in 3-5 years. 

Is this even possible? Would a hard money lender even loan a deal like this, knowing we want it to be our personal property? We figure we could always sell it if the line of credit didn't work out. 

Also this is my first time posting (besides the new members forum). Let me know if I should post this in a different forum.