LFS is the place to start (or possibly Gentoo). But in either case it is a very demanding process. If your build environment is not working, you don't stand a chance. What errors are you getting?
Incidentally, I would consider myself to be a fairly advanced Linux user/sysadmin with 10+ years' experience, but even I wouldn't attempt this. It's just too much pain when there are plenty of perfectly good distributions out there.
