brent I'm going to prep the disk the right way and reinstall Budgie.
Sounds like a plan! If you have any questions as you do it, just ask. I've been there, and done that.
You'll want to make a swap partition while you're creating your boot partition. Make it just a little bigger than the amount of RAM in the computer, so you can enjoy the benefits of hibernation while you're at it. (Even if you never choose to hibernate your system, it'll be useful swap space, so make it big enough while you can.)
So, to review:
Boot partition: 1.0 GB, formatted FAT 32, flag BOOT
Swap partition: based on size of RAM. formatted Linux-swap, flag SWAP
The rest is probably formatted EXT4, and you know what to do with the rest of your disk.
The nice thing about this is that there's nothing to lose if you make a mistake somewhere during the process. You're preparing a disk that has nothing on it that you need to save. If you need to, you can give the device a new, empty partition table and correct the problem with a blank slate to work with.
As you begin to install Budgie, choose the option that lets you use the partitions you've created instead of letting the installer have the whole disk. Then on the next page, you assign the mount points. Assign SWAP to your swap partition, / to the root of your file system, and nothing to the boot partition. If I remember right, it's the next page on which you name the system that you'll see that the boot loader is correctly assigned to your BOOT partition.
If that line is greyed-out, it means something isn't right and you should fix it and start the installer again. If it's readable and identifies the partition you set up as BOOT, then you're good to go. The rest of the setup is something you've done so many times, you could probaby do it with your eyes closed.