I initially started by buying parts of AliExpress to build a mobile node and a base station node at home. I discovered that there was someone else I had previously known through work that had a few nodes deployed and after talking to him we found a good location that would connect my house to his nodes.
We are lucky here that the city is surrounded by hills so putting a few nodes on the hills as routers gives good coverage (some of these are hidden nodes deployed in out of the way places where people hopefully don’t find them). HeyWhatsThat is a useful site for figuring out where to deploy nodes that have good line of sight and coverage:
The other thing that has helped is that the Meshtastic community here has a few people who have previously worked in wireless ISPs or are ham radio operators so there is some useful experience with planning and deploying wireless equipment.