Since the house is pretty much movein ready, potential home improvement projects are rather limited.  The first one that I had originally planned on doing was wiring the house with ethernet.  But low and behold after walking through it as an owner, I noticed that there are RJ45 jacks in various rooms around the house.  After the initial bout of enthusiasm, I plugged my MacBook Pro into it and it didn’t detect anything on the other end.

Looking around for a bit, I eventually found a mini wiring cabinet in the garage.  Turns out all of those RJ45 jacks are connected to a OnQ Phone Punchdown.   After a bit of research, I believe that this problem can be “fixed” by splicing the cable before it hits the punchdown, attaching a patch panel both to the punchdown and walljacks, then using patch cables to connect each jack to either a switch or the phone punchdown.  Looking at MonoPrice, I can probably do all this for about 60 bucks(I already have a switch).

The main worry that I have about this plan is having network equipment in a non-climate controlled garage.