Nice job! Thanks for making your project open source and releasing to the community
On the topic of surface mount soldering, it's is not very difficult when done via reflow at home for $20-$50. You probably still want some experience, though.
$10 for a toaster oven at a thrift store
$20 for a multimeter with thermocouple
$20 for solder paste in syringe
Results
here (this is a first try). Also, note the larger of the two chips, while not perfectly square with the pads, was completing the circuit properly (we later reworked this chip).
The hard part is gauging how much solder paste to apply - we used a tooth pick to apply paste, but did apply a little too much the first time. We later applied smaller amounts with great success.
Additionally, we did not use a programmable temperature control. Rather, we found three temperature settings on the oven and changed the temperature dial according to the time in the solder paste spec sheet.