Buying a house is a good thing financially and future wise. The smart thing to do is buy the worst house in the best area. But the issue with that, especially for someone with good mechanical/fabrication skills like yourself, is there is always heaps of work to do on an old house and it is hard to pay good $ for someone else to do what you can do yourself. On top of that (speaking from experience) trying to work on houses after having worked on car bodies, painting etc is you always aim for perfection in cut length, finish, painting etc. In reality house framing, plaster finishing and painting are only required to be finished to what would be called "rough as guts" on a car. Probably the only place that really requires precision is bricklaying and tiling - both of which you will excel at having done panel and gap work yourself.
If you do buy an old house, make sure you invest in (unless you already have them), again from experience. Lots of this sort of stuff comes up cheap on Marketplace:
Quality drill and Tek skins and batteries.
Battery circular saw.
Drop saw that can do multi-angle and complex angles (240V ones are cheap used as most trades going to battery).
Nail gun (air will be good enough for house repair).
Saw horses.
Good step ladder, and maybe a platform ladder or alloy scaff up to 1.2-1.5m.
Manual plumbing crimper with at least 1/2" and 3/4" dies. These are a godsend when making plumbing repairs. Also little copper 1/2" and 3/4" cutting tools and a little copper pipe de-burring tool.
A few plaster application tools (you probably already have some of these for vehicle filler).
Paint trays and rollers.
Large hole saws for 90mm, 100mm plumbing and downlights.
Plasterboard saw.
300-400mm and 1200mm spirit levels.
Whatever you do don't try and do electrical yourself. If you have an eleco mate labour for him/her. You will be able to run cables, hammer in mounting plates etc etc as an electrical labourer, just leave the connections and mandatory testing to the tradesperson.
The other advice I'd give you is if you buy a place and do drainage and stormwater, DON'T run 90mm. Use at least 100mm, maybe 150mm. 90mm blocks just looking at it. And tiling sucks and it is hard. The bigger the tiles the harder it is. After just completing 3 x bathrooms at home with a tiler, to do it properly it is the single most complicated task in a house. You actually have to design the ceiling height, where the shower angles go etc etc around the tile sizes so they work and joints end up in doorways, full tiles in the right paces and no silly little impossible cuts.
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