First welcome to the quilt board, you will find a lot of help from the wonderful people here.
Check out Bonnie Hunter's tutorial "De-boneing a Shirt"
http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2012/...irt-movie.html I've got many of my dad's shirts and plan on using this method.
As for a t-shirt quilt, if you do decide to cut the shirts before putting on the stabilizer, cut them larger to give yourself some leeway. I can also recommend the pizza boxes for storage or pick up some of the 2.5 gallon zip-lock bags so you can label and sort as you go through all of it.
For the crazy quilt the great thing is there's not right or wrong, decide how big of a block you want and you can put them together however you want. If you want something more structured you can get free patterns on google, make your own paper templates for the block size or you might pick up the creative grids scrap crazy rulers for more structure and consistency.
It's wonderful that you want to make things for your family, but it can be an intimidating task so get some or all of them involved in different parts of the processes, don't stress yourself and your husband by doing it alone if you don't have to...hand him some scissors or a rotary cutter!
Good luck!