Welcome steve.
I'm mid 30's and I am in the middle of my training. Doing the hours on your own is fine, but the benefit of doing it at stapleford, is a) you get a good deal and b) you can take a CPL instructor up once in a while to give you pointers.
you don't need to do a mega structured hours building deal, but do make every hour count like you said.
I did my hours elswhere, but I set myself Nav ex's everytime I went flying, I went to lots of different airfields and built up to flying in marginal weather and winds.
Don't just drill holes in the sky for 100 hours, if you do the hour building well then you have a much better chance of doing the CPL and IR in minimum hours.
I don't think employers are going to be too bothered about the hour building - My take on the current employment market is that potential employers care about YOU - your attitude, your 'employability' your 'trainability'. They may be interested in the standards of your IR and your sim abilities on the day of the assesment, but I doubt very much if they will care where or how you did those 100 hours of hour building.
Best of luck - us "30 somethings" have got to show the airlines that we are a better bet than those young nippers!