Changing the body color

I'm looking to change the color of my Barracuda here within the next year so I'm trying to put together a plan to be able to get started on it.

I'm fixing the car up but I'm not doing a total restoration or anything. Basically just engine, brakes, rear end, paint and freshening up the interior. The car is fairly clean but it's white and I just don't like the white look on a fastback.

My question is, what's the easiest DIY way to go about a color change? Do you guys normally take the shell in to get blasted or just sand it yourself? From researching online, blasting the entire car can cost from $1k-2k. I don't necessarily care about the undercarriage or the paint underneath the carpet and all the trim being the same color so I don't know if that's necessary for me. I'm going to be driving it a lot and I don't want to worry about everything being perfect all the time. I just want to make sure the body, under the hood, trunk, door jambs and anything visible is going to look good with the new color.

Now I've never sprayed before but I heard that primer isn't a big deal since you have to sand it anyway. Plus you don't really need to create a booth type setting when spraying primer right?

So what are the steps here? Sand everything down, epoxy primer, body work, high build primer, block and then take to body shop to get color sprayed?