Having given up hope on using the capSense library due to porting issues, I decided on getting a touch board as well. It also seemed more reliable, and since they’re I2C, easier to work with, consuming less of my precious I/O pins.
I ended up buying the MPR121 from aliexpress, which I’m very happy with. (available on eBay for ~$7 shipping included, Sparkfun for $10+shipping) Delivery was (surprisingly) fast, and the board works great. You can connect up to twelve electrodes with individually configurable sensitivity settings, as well as combining all twelve, thereby creating one huge sensitive 13th virtual sensor.
Having no coding experience, I thought porting the library would be hell. After some struggling, and some help from my (EE) dad, it turned out I just had to connect a wire to give it the proper I2C address. After that it worked like a charm.
Since I didn’t feel like permanently soldering wires to it, I just stuck a wire through the hole and twisted it, until they stuck, hoping for an electrical connection. Sluggish as that may have been, it miraculously worked, and I could do stuff by touching the wires.
Though that was fun, the whole idea behind capacitive touch is, that well, you don’t have to touch it. I then attached ~5x5cm (~2x2 inch) pieces of aluminum foil to the wires, just wrapping them around the wires lightly.
Being no great feat of electrical construction, this at first didn’t work. After messing around with it a bit, it turned out that I had to reboot the cap-board, since it initializes all sensors at power up, and thus had to reinitialize the changed capacitance of the added aluminum foil.
The board then worked great, and I’m able to sense my hand through my wooden desk, which is around ~5cm (~2inch) thick. Good enough for my purposes, since I’d like to stick it behind my wallpaper to create some hidden buttons 
Money well spent on that board. 12 sensors, which can be used as LED drivers if unused. You can even use them as I/O pins I believe, but I’m not experienced enough to figure out how. All in all, I can certainly recommend the board 