I used to be a freelance web developer. (Before you ask: vim, Rails, MacBook Pro, and BSD servers - OpenBSD to store private data, and FreeBSD to scale; everything else is for failures)
The biggest pain about this, clients aside, is having to deal with the designers. I understand that they use a different part of the brain than I do, but some things are simply ridiculous.
From my experience in dealing with them, designers can either produce incredible work but be extremely difficult to work with, or produce eye pollution and be great to work with.
Does anyone know of a designer that produces good work without making you want to kill yourself? If you're a designer looking for work, send your portfolio to nick[at]whitepaperclip[dot]com
[edit] Web work; I don't want HTML/CSS coded.
My email is nick[at]whitepaperclip[dot]com