Managed to make the LED blink on my custom FPGA board. It was quite a challenge and I am glad I didn't go for a BGA package.
I placed the ICE40 chip on the board with drag soldering. The other components you can hand solder except for the oscillator which requires hot air ( used AYOUE 852) and paste. In the next iteration, I plan to use mainly hot air (it is much faster). Used TS100 as a soldering iron, the Loctice GC10  for paste, flux and some desoldering wire to get the solder on the TQ144 component right. Biggest headache is that I didn't realize I had to send a wake up packet to the flash ram. I tried the python script ice zero prog to flash the memory but it didn' t work; turns out the wake up packet is implemented in icezprog but not in the old python script (OMG!).
Also found out the board has too many caps and resistors, icezero uses less see schema