I don't miss the days of trying to fix coils or rewick dinky ego coils with silica thread type wick. Just not worth the trouble in my opinion, too many affordable rta's or rda's. I guess it may depend on where you're at and what availability is for wire and stuff. Most places can get even smaller spools of wire. If you're tight on money, even smaller spools of kbee or UD wire should work.
You can go on ebay and find 50ft of kanthal 24ga from lightning vapes for $4.50 and free shipping. Fasttech takes longer to ship but sells 10m (around 30ft) of 24ga kanthal for $1.73 and free shipping. Cotton is cheap. Or if you go with lightning vapes they sell combo packs on ebay, like 100ft of ss316L in 26ga along with a pouch of cotton bacon v2 for $6.19 shipped free.
Many affordable options around for rebuilding without harvesting mystery metal from household appliances and things like mad max. It would be enough to build simple functional coils and enough to last awhile, long enough to save up here and there for various sizes/types of wire if you were looking to get into building things like claptons, fused claptons etc. Once you find something you enjoy and have a bit more money saved up you could invest in larger bulk coils for greater savings over the long haul.