Maybe start here

https://sciplus.com/

With little knowledge beyond high school chemistry the main factor is accuracy. Less you care the cheaper it gets.

I'm old enough to remember chemistry sets and they kind of don't exist any more. Anyway the stuff for making PCB's overlaps only slightly.

You probably want to first gain some understanding of the stuff you are trying to do, before messing with expensive dangerous chemicals and all that. I like Ken Shiriff's reverse engineering blog righto.com and maybe you can follow links from there.

I've always been told through hole plating is quite difficult. Make some single sided boards first, then double sided using vias to connect stuff across the two sides, before pursuing PTH. But I think home PCB's aren't really a thing any more either, at least for digital circuits. You can get super cheap board fab from JLPCB or whatever, instead of trying to do fine enough pad pitch for modern tiny SMT parts.

Your local methlab, perhaps?