This won't come as a surprise to anyone, but you really can reflow an 
SMT PCB at home.
I bought a $30 toaster oven at Home Depot.  I bought solder paste from 
Digikey.
I created the PCB layout with Eagle and got E-Tek-net to make the boards.
When I got the boards and parts, I first sorted the parts into top-side 
and bottom-side.
I first populated the bottom side.
I got the syringe out of the fridge, applied a dot of paste to each R, 
C, D & Q pad, laid down
a continuous string of paste across each row of pads of the SOICs.
Then using tweezers and my BoM, I placed each component into the solder 
paste, trying
to be careful to align each part correctly.
After all parts were placed, I put the PCB in the oven which had been 
idling at 300 deg-F
for a while.  I left the board in for 3 minutes, then cranked the temp 
control to 450 F.
I then watched the solder paste through the oven's window.  After about 
a minute,
the solder turned shiny and melted. I left the board in the oven another 
30 seconds
then turned the oven off and opened the door for cooling.
After cooling, I inspected the board and found only two solder bridges
on SOICs.  I removed the bridges and then repeated the whole
process on the top side of the board.  The bottom side components
stayed on even upside down due, I guess, to surface tension.
The board is 2.5x4.75 (inches) with about 100 parts.
The components also seemed to self align due to surface tension
or magic.
The whole process took about 2 hours.  Could probably do it in 1 hour
if the parts bags were already opened and now that I've done
it once.

If I can do this, YOU CAN TOO!!!
-- 

*Carey Fisher*

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