Well your post brought back some old memories (1'm 69 ).Rubber band wind up stick models with paper covering,control line models,and the old silk covering shrunk with dope.Was a lot of fun.

I was allways good at building models (my downfall is covering them with the iron on film ).The covering jobs on my models is never fancy but they all fly nice.

I'm in this section now because i was asking for information on the RC electric models (i'm going the other way...from gas to electric ).

If you are just interested in building your own model i understand and not here to offer advice on any one model over the other.But i agree with most of the above post about the "ARF" models.A guy can't even build one as cheap as you can buy an "ARF" that can be in air in just a few hours of assembly time.Most of them i have bought are well made (sometimes do beef up a few things on them ).
Some of them use stick on film covering which can be a little problematic.Most of them look a lot fancyer that i can cover them.

If you are going to get into flying them ....My opinion is also a 40 or 60 size trainer type plane is the way to go as they fly nice at slower speeds and are a lot easyer to see for most of us older guys.

For me in the past being used to using elemers glue and pinning everything and waiting for it to dry.it is a big step forward now to have the super glue that sets up in seconds or about a minute or so.It speeds up building,and making repairs at the flying field is fast and lets one continue on flying where in the past it involved taking the plane home and repairing it and flying the next day.

Good luck on what ever you choose to do.........

For what it's worth................................BIGMIG