Your situation is exactly why Van first sells the tail kit... You can simultaneously build your toolkit, build some skills, determine if building is the right thing for you to do, and see if you can remained married while building. Some spouses get involved in the building process because banging rivets is a 2-person job and they decide they really like doing something as a team with their spouse, and some decide it's just another stupid thing their husbands have gotten themselves into.
Either way, if you start with the tail kit and don't go overboard buying tools, you don't risk all that much money and you can even recover some of the cost if you bail out by selling the tools and the remains of your tail kit.
My Dad had a good enough experience with his RV-6A tail kit that he got the wing kits. By the time he was done with the wings however, he was through with the whole thing and he sold the parts and most of the specialty tools. It was an expensive experiment but he took it farther than most would have before quitting. If they had the pre-drilled quickbuild kits, I'm very sure he would have finished because most of the time he spent "building" was actually spent agonizing over where to drill the next hole. With the new kits, there is much less cutting and drilling so it's easier to gain confidence and see some results. I wouldn't consider trying to build the original RV-6A kit due to the skill required, but if I was out of the military I'd start a quickbuild RV7 or 8 tomorrow.
