[MandoMan]

Originally Posted by villagetinker

Delay your move by a week, stay at a local hotel, and get the stuff you absolutely need for your house. NOTE: VERY IMPORTANT!! Make sure your new house shows up on Google Maps, etc., or you may have a lot of trouble getting your stuff delivered. Make sure your cell phone number is on all delivery instructions and be prepared to provide directions to lost delivery drivers, been there done that. Next will be getting your furniture in your house and arranged. If you are not staying there, you can stop when you are tired, and go to the hotel, rest, and get back into it the next morning. We did an initial move (U-Haul) with enough furniture to 'live' in the house for a few days as we beat the furniture delivery. The washer and dryer were ordered up North, and they literally could not find the NEW zip code for delivery, even the associated store in the villages could not find the new zip code.
As noted above, get in the house, RELAX, then and only then start to look into modifications. While lots of people love solar tube lights, these do not work well on cloudy days or at night, unless you get the ones with auxiliary lights installed ($$$). We found it much more cost effective to just have an additional light installed in place of a solar tube light.
The only item we did before moving in and after closing was to coat the garage floor. It is a real pain to do this after the garage is filled (storage is very limited in these houses).
Hope this helps, and welcome to TV.

I had four solar tubes installed in my previous home in The Villages—one in each bathroom and two in the very dark living room where I couldn’t read in the day without a light, and I loved them. A year ago I moved to a 1200 sq ft courtyard villa. It has enough light 8n the living room to read in the day without turning on lights, but not in the master bedroom. However, installed solar tubes cost about $800 each. My biggest electric bill has been $130, of which maybe $15 is lights, at most. While it might be nice to have more light in the bathrooms (which have no windows) or in the bedroom (though the SolarTubes guy says putting tubes in a bedroom is too much light for most people), really, it’s not cost effective. Given that I don’t often have the bathroom lights on and might still have them on when using the bathroom, I doubt that the solar tubes would save me a dollar a year in electricity.