Steve, I recently did "a driveway" paint job on my 32 high boy. I'm in California also so I had to go with the new waterborne paint. Here's some reference points from my experience.

I live in a metro area and needed to be sensative to the nieghborhood (dust, noise, paint smells, etc.). The best advice given to me was from Ken Thurm, to powdercoat everything that was in bare steel with powdercoat primer. This was less costly than paying for media blasting and also buying epoxy primer material. It was also quick, and gave me time to finish the metal work without eveything rusting. I just block sanded, filled, then epoxy primed over the powdercoat. They did a phosphate treatment after the media blast for rust and adhesion.

I did everything in my driveway from bare metal work, to final block sand and buff, everything "except for final shooting on the sealer, basecoat, clearcoat", which I hired out to a friend with a booth. I used PPG Envirobase ($350/gal). I painted 27 parts inside and out, and still had some of the original gallon of base color left over. I was very happy with the final results, but was worried going with the new waterborn paint for the first time. I would agree that on a street car you want to stay with a paint system that will allow you to make easy repairs in the future.

My single "most important" suggestion is to find a paint dealer that you are comfortable with and stick to their advice to the letter. It's not difficult, it was hard work but still interesting and fun project.

The cost of materials was way more costly than I expected. From sandpaper, to primer, sealer, clear, compound, etc., every trip to the paint store was $300 to $400. It's a very time consuming process, but if you take your time, don't rush any step, you will have a nice result and save many thousands of dollars. I completly understand why it costs $10 to $15K to have a nice paint job done. I worked almost every weekend for a year to do mine.