It's hard to do this one halfway. I have played with an inexpensive
poppy seed grinder to grind wheat, but it was so much work that if I
didn't have a specific purpose in mind (I needed a small amount of
flour that was not heated during milling for a special starter) I'd
have quit fast. So starting too small can easily doom your efforts to failure.
I have only used electric flour mills regularly, and have used a
tiny, still quite noisy mill that could only do 2-3 cups at a time,
and pretty coarsely at that--again, it was not easily putting out a
lot of fine flour so had limited usefulness. I have used two
different electric mills, both of them impact-type mills, that are
wonderfully fast and make really fine flour as well as coarser
stuff. They're pretty loud,but the newer one is less so. I've seen
several similar models available for about $200--check out the
nutrimill and the ultramill here:
http://www.pleasanthillgrain.com/index.asp#Nutrimill.
If you can afford one of these, or can wait and save for it, I think
you're more likely to stick with the fresh milled stuff for the long
run. If you use white wheats and mill the flour fine enough, even
finicky eaters may not notice that they're eating whole grain goods.
I've put together some random notes on my favorite things about
milling my own wheat here:
http://www.well.com/user/debunix/recipes/WholeBaking.html
Diane Brown in St. Louis
http://www.well.com/user/debunix/recipes/FoodPages.html