Recommendations for gear/network setup for new-to-me-house

[Enthusiast Builder]

Moving to my "forever house" from an apartment, and want to get the whole house wired correctly. Unfortunately, its an older house; it was redone in 2003, but generally not wired for Ethernet. I consider myself fairly savvy by average joe standards, but a little over my head here. Any help is appreciated. There are five rooms total.

I can't afford to rip down drywall and re-wire right now. I believe the two new rooms that were built in 2003 have cat5 wiring for the telephone jacks. There are telephone jacks in every room, plus a few other places around the house. I don't have telephone service now, and would like to go VOIP in my new home.

How can I best wire my new place? Here are my thoughts - looing for help:
1) I want to buy a patch panel, disconnect the 2 cat5 cables from the two 'new' rooms, wire them to patch panel at junction end, then re-wire the room ends to a rj45 jack - should work, right?
2) Trying to identify the other phone runs...some of them are old, seem to be cat3, but the others are 4 pair...not sure if they are cat3 or cat5

What would my "home" look like (where everything lives - the center of the star topology)? I have a UTM box running Sophos UTM I built, but I feel like I need a switch in the 'home' to connect the 5 rooms plus any other places I wire. Do I get a managed witch, so I can do QoS for VoIP? Any recommendations on a switch, and a cheap rack?

 

[bill001g]

If all the wires go back to a central location you will have the best chance to replace the rj11 with rj45. If they daisy chain off each other then it will be close to impossible. You can try even the cat3 cable, you likely can make it work at 100m if not 1g. It may not actually meet the specification but if it work it works if not then you didn't lose much other than your time to test. If you have coax tv cable you could try MoCA devices for the rooms that the jacks to not work in.

You do not really need any special switch. You better not have queues in the house on a gig switch that you need to use QoS for. Pretty much any 8 port gig switch will meet your needs.

It depends on how the room all the wires run into is built. Many times this is a shallow cabenet built into the wall and if you have power in it you could put the switch inside. A actual rack is going to cost a lot of money and most small switches do not have rack mount hardware anyway.

Most people just mount these directly to the wall.