Building My Own Home Router
Rolling your own firewall is almost always a bad idea.  Hardening a full blown distro is a terrible place to start, and no place for a novice to "guess" that they have it locked down "enough".There are numerous open source firewall distro's that have the advantage of being authored by people well practiced in security coding, pen testing, etc, and are continually crowd tested for loopholes and shortcomings.It's your edge device for security - not exactly a place you want to take risks with.