A little update. My brother and I started on the build yesterday. We only had a couple hours though (and be new at this) we didn't expect to get very far. We got everything installed, but did not have time to wire or test it yet.
There were a few bumps in the road along the way. The first was unexpected: we had a lot of trouble mounting the extra fan. At first I thought it was me, but after reading some reviews of the case I purchased, I discovered it was due to poor design. The front intake mount has incorrectly sized holes for the fan, which made it impossible to mount. And then the motherboard blocks the two top mounted sections.
The only other major problem we encountered is that I installed the heatsink facing the wrong direction (fan facing up/down instead of left/right). I felt pretty stupid about that, but I guess it's an easy fix.
So up next is reinstalling the heatsink, wiring everything up, and installing the OS.