Model Railroading and the 0-Budget Layout

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, but just haven't. The context is this: Last year my family moved into a new home. The home included a large unfinished basement (a big selling point for me). My wife and I struck a deal. She could have the upstairs office and I could have the basement.
So, as we were getting ready to close on the house, it occurred to me that I would finally have a place to build a real model train layout.
Since then, I have been somewhat obsessed with trains. Sometimes more than others. In the early time (before we even moved in) certain realities were very clear. Even though I had space, I had no extra cash. All the money was going into the new house. However, I also had some materials left over from fixing up the old house. I also had some old track and some old trains and car. I decided to "make do" and my 0-Budget Layout was born!
I am not going to go into details now, but I have pictures that I would like to post later.
I made some discoveries along the way. The first is that a budget of $0 has not been achieved, but it is still pretty low. Also, I found that my brain did allow me the purchase of some new trains (mostly cars with a new loco for my birthday). That sort of snowballed into buying things to fix up my old stuff. So, I have spent more than I should, but technically, it wasn't on the layout. ;) (rationalization, I know)
I do continue on my quest to build a layout on recycled materials. However, soon I am going to allow myself 1 exception. I am going to purchase a new power system. For those who know, power is expensive and hard to make do with. Plus, I am changing the type of power I am going to use from DC to DCC. This is a big change and an expensive one. It is also what I will be using on the new layout. Plus it has some pretty good gadget value. So, I am going to upgrade power now which totally blows my 0 budget. But there are still many areas to explore and I hope more on this will follow in future posts.