Great work, will take a while to populate one of those!

Yes, and that will be reflected in the price 

The first job we had was to assemble the HEF40097 IC's - the only ones we could buy in any quantities were surface mount types so we had to design up a tiny adaptor board as they don't make adaptors for 16 pin IC's (there isn't enough width sideways usually) and we couldn't easily change the PCB to accept S/M chips for these. Here is the first one: