Hi Mitchell
I did a couple of self-led home retreats. They were very short: 1 day each. They did not "get me" stream entry, but they were interesting and instructive and well worth it. If you can manage retreats longer than a day, that's great! You can find Tarin's "Reformed Slacker's Guide" on the DhO wiki; it contains a lot of good stuff.
Mitchell K Hardy:
Any recommendations for length? I know that Daniel had mentioned 10 days being a good amount to notice a difference. However, my main goals right now are to master jhanas 1-4, and to get SE. Which one should I focus on? Also, if going for SE, how long should I plan my solo retreat to make sure I can make it all the way to my first Frution?
My own experience is that three months of highly dedicated practice during normal daily life, which included the short retreats I mentioned, were "enough". I use quotes because this is so highly individual and subjective and depends on so many other factors apart from sitting duration. But as for the duration, three months should be a realistic attempt.
My last question is this: when noticing the vibrations in the piti-sukha stage should I try to notice all the vibrations throughout my whole body, or should I try to discern the vibrations more acutely within a confined area (i.e. my arms, my legs, fingers, etc.). It seems to be easier to feel the up-and-down movement of the vibrations when I am focusing on a smaller area. Is this sufficient for insight to arise?
That's a great question, and if you're after insight, then asking, investigating, experimenting with, ... this question is exactly where insight starts to arise.
In other words, if you got the answer "do the small area" and then you just did it, you probably would't get much insight
from this answer. And if the answer were "notice all the vibrations", and you did that, again, that in itself wouldn't get you insight.
So it's when you think, "Oh, for goodness sake, this person says to do the small area, that one says to do the whole body, so scratch that, they don't seem to know what they are talking about, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this by myself!" that you'll start getting insight.
Buckle down and launch that Dharma-raft into the flood. It's a single-seat raft anyway, and the torrent is noisy, so you won't be hearing much of what we are yelling across anyway. It's mainly cheering you on, asserting our support, and you can safely ignore it and concentrate on getting across

Cheers!
Florian