Yea, I've built two little systems so far. One on the house to power my HAM radio, charge batteries/phones when the grid is down and I don't want to fire the generator, etc. Has one cheesy little inverter which I've not actually used in production yet. The other system is just to keep the truck battery topped off while it sits in the car port but it is running a real charge controller so if/when I want to add panels I can, it's not a pre-built solar automotive charger.
I picked up the panel, cables, charge controller, etc all from Amazon and just put it together myself. The kits usually aren't bad, and you can always expand them later by replacing the charge controller with a 'real' one.
One thing I would do differently for the house system if I redid it would be to go 24v or 48v. Running 12v over distance requires huge gauge wire, which gets expensive. If I add more panels to the roof I'll bump the system up in voltage so I don't have to run more wire down to the battery area.
Depending on your load, you might be able to run right off the charge controller (most can feed 12v @ 30A). The advantage there is that when the batteries run out the controller cuts off the load so you don't damage the batteries. I used the charge controller feed to power relays so I could run more amps and control things seperatly and yet still have all the loads cut when the batteries are (safely) depleted.
My panel is a little fugly, or maybe it's steampunk, hard to tell. All built on the cheap (automotive relays and wiring block, blade fuse holder, switch panel is out of a boat with the mount made of tie straps I had left over from the coop, etc).
