PCB fabrication has changed a lot in the last couple of years, at least for me. Steel stencils, paste and reflow ovens used to be out of reach. Not any more! The construction steps for PCBs are:
apply paste to PCB through stencil
place parts by hand
put it in a cheap IR reflow oven and press ‘start’
go for a 7.5 minute walk
Hand placement works surprisingly well. Surface tension works to your advantage, centering the parts on their pads. Companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit sell plenty of modules that are placed by hand. I’ve started doing this too, for short runs of modules. TermDriver is made in this way.