Now he obviously is a master in his craft and I am struggling to start, but what we have in common is a paid off home.

Pick an area you know well and have some peers that can look after it even if you decide to employ professional management.

We typically employ a week-long trial period during which we'll give them a single project (e.g., making 10 seller calls, or posting 3 houses for sale on Craigslist).We make sure to provide detailed instructions and give them crystal-clarity on what successful completion looks like, and then we turn them loose.At the end of the week, we'll assess their performance.

If you can only afford a one bedroom condo then put up some temp walls or create a wall with book cases, etc in the living room and turn the 1 bedroom condo into a two "bedroom" condo with no common area, then get a roommate for the actual bedroom.Then in about a year or two, rent out the condo and at that point maybe you are ready to qualify to buy a house that's in a good neighborhood and then you move into that. 

Self-employed and loans are a challenge...

Only, make sure you do an application ahead of time to prescreen for employment and call their landlord.

IRR is the most common metric for comparing one real estate opportunity against another, and in my experience it is the one that most investors prioritize. 

These ones are a little more common, without the variance analysis. 

I’m self employed and do cabinetry for a living and am savvy with a lot of other construction areas.

Determining this might be common sense, but I'm hoping some of the professionals could weigh in.