Linux From Scratch

I did it a long time ago, I found it easiest to do it by dual booting. Install a more common distro, but setup the disks yourself so you have a chunk of space available at the end of the disk, then install LFS on to the space you left from inside your regular distro. It means you can just leave it at any break point without having to figure out where you were. You have a working distro to play on whilst things compile as well, which is nice. Then you can just add the LFS install to grub and boot into it whenever you want once it's at that point.