I would echo was Stealth said. Doing doing the patch panel yourself can be a lot of fun and rewarding. At least for me it was, because it was the culmination of the end of my wiring project. If you're doing it yourself, just remember to be really careful when stripping the cables, because the wires are pretty fragile inside and nicking them is bad news. I had that problem early on, but caught it before things went to far - essentially, if you nick a wire, when you untwist them, you'll find they break very easily.
Since we're posting wiring, here is the end of my project.
Initially, I was going to terminate in the mechanical room, but I started having second thoughts about that - for one, it gets pretty warm, secondly if anybody does any work on the furnace of water heater, whatever, it's at risk.
I bought some cheap central vac pvc to protect the wires in the mechanical room, and then routed them into an adjacent storage room.
Once all of the wires were through, I organized them in groups of 6 (upstairs, downstairs, office) and started punching them into the panel and testing them as I went along with an Apple TV that I could move between rooms quickly and see on the router that the connection was good.
I didn't have much room to put a rack, so I hung everything up on the shelving that was already in the storage room, and also added an outlet. Heavy duty zip ties to the rescue.
By some stupid mistake of mine, I thought 1 ft patch cords would be long enough, but they weren't, so I move the switch just above the patch panel. I also picked some patriotic colours for the patch cords, because, well, why not? I will move the modem and the router somewhere off the switch when the new ISP provides service and the installation is more or less finalized. It's not overly toasty, but its good practice anyway to space them out to extend the life of the electronics.
