I have made a few PCB's. I found it really easy to do the toner transfer
method, OK I made a few fuck ups, but as soon as you see the toner is incomplete you can wipe it off and have another go.

Paper. I used, successfully, door spam[pizza advert] golf magazine and some photo paper being flogged a quid for 25 sheets at Tescos. as long as it's shiny it seems to work.
You need to be able to set the toner density high, new windows drivers for laser printers[I have an old laserjet] often don't allow this but there is a laserjet configuration utility that does.
I tried washing the pcb's with a abrasive cleaning medium, like it says in most articales about it, results were crap, I use brake cleaner.
I cleaned the pcb with a fine scotchbrite pad.
I wear latex gloves while handling and cleaning the board, don't and the tracks around the edges won't stick.
I iron the print on for a few minutes, I don't know if there is a time limit, but if you don't do it long enough it doesn't stick.

Washing the paper off has never been the easy 'it floats off after a minute' that is sometimes described. Leave it in water a while and roughen the back with a finger nail, you might remove some or a lot of it. then leave it for 5 mins and remove what you can and keep doing it till you have it all off. You get it off by rubbing with a finger and the paper balls up and comes away leaving the toner.
The toner should be really well stuck on and you can brush it with a nail brush and it won't come off, I take a scalpel to any fine bit's of paper that are bridging copper, as long as the etchant gets to the copper it's ok.

Best to add polygons so you don't have to much to etch off. I always seem to set teh hoel size, in pads, to large, best to err on the small size as soldering tends to be neater.

That is a PCB for my mill. it's double sided and came out pretty good. The pic was taken prior to washing the toner off and drilling the holes, the copper has been etched off.