But I need to build a whole system that does not consume more than 32GB of disk space and that I think will take some tinkering

Not at all. My non-minimalistic Debian installation takes 11GB, which includes all latex packages (quite a lot), a graphical environment, apache2, postgresql, a news spool, an office suite and so on.

I don't use the distributions like SuSE or RedHat, but I'm pretty sure that even they will fit nicely onto 32GB hard disc.