It might be a good idea to first get an estimate of your bodyfat percentage. There are scales that can do this, skinfold calipers can be used, or using a sewing kit's tape measure and doing various points on the body there are calculators on the net that can give an estimate based upon that.
A few different ways of measuring can be used to see if they are all in the same ballpark and using those you can have a decent estimate of what your bodyfat percentage is.
Wikipedia has a reasonable chart of bodyfat percentages and what levels correlate with what sort of body type.
Description Women Men
Essential fat 12–15% 2–5%
Athletes 16–20% 6–13%
Fitness 21–24% 14–17%
Acceptable 25–31% 18–25%
Obese 32%+ 25%+
With that, you'll have a better idea of whether you may want to prefer to gain muscle or gain fat.
The 50/50 basal/bolus guideline is just a general guideline. My basal/bolus split is about 30 to 40% basal, 60 to 70% bolus.
It's also very reasonable to gain strength without a gym membership. In fact I'd recommend anyone who decides to start strength training to consider beginning with simple bodyweight exercises like pull ups, push ups, squats. There are ways to change the leverages to decrease or increase how much strength is needed to perform bodyweight exercises and early on a lot of strength gained comes from simply teaching the nervous system how to coordinate the muscle fiber recruitment. I think the development of strength like that with increased body awareness is a good thing to work for.
