I'm not an expert at all however, and I would like to avoid making it sound like I know what I'm doing (I really don't) so I will take any advice given to me gratefully and read all of the relevant documentation and wiki articles before posing a question.
About my "OS": I'm not too far along. I only (re)started about a week ago, so I basically only have the bare minimum to have something to show off at parties. It's x86_64 based, and I'm rolling my own bootloader that gets me set up into long mode and passes control to a kernel I'm building in C and NASM assembly. I have libraries to write stuff to the VGA hardware in bytes or strings, I'm working on expanding my IDT to do more than print out the number of the interrupt, and that's really about it actually oops.
My mental picture of my OS is some weird lovechild between MSDOS and a Commodore64. I learned programming on a TI-84 Plus using TI-Basic and really like the feel of command line interfaces (I'm a bit of a "Lino Commando"). My thoughts were to implement first a filesystem and text editor, and an interpreter for Basic including a C64 style live interpreter to mess with outside of files. The current issue with this fantasy is I haven't the slightest clue where to begin on filesystems (other than the obvious: File_System) but I'm sure with enough reading I'll figure it out
Anyway this has gotten very long winded but I just wanted to reiterate how excited I am to be able to participate in this amazing community of guys and gals doing something so ridiculously cool and exciting. Hope to see you all around!
I always like these sorts of projects. I grew up with Atari Basic in ROM & wasn't happy when I "upgraded" to a computer which was not so easily programmable. 
I use Forth these days, but a friend of mine would love a Basic-like language, and sometimes I miss it too. A compiler is a pretty big project though.