draconusde

From my limited experience, and no doubts many wiser heads will tell you the best way, but I've found ballasting first to be simplest, mainly because doing it the other way the landscape had a habit of getting in the way, particularly if you have any cuttings planned.

Congratulations with your "new" job.

Hope you can start building soon on your layout. 

It's also a new challenge to try to create something with a low budget. 

lol, i've become an expert on low budget :)/ Hopefully now I should have enough regular income to actually make proper progress

Is moving them outside of the baseboard too much of an issue? moving the forwar a few inches so there on a seperate panel mounted to the front of the layout, thereby separating the control and the layout modelling. Does that make sense anywhere but in my head?