I've got about 20 ports round my house and a further 6 in the garage, I used cat6 to replace my existing cat5e due to future proofing, I paid about 80 quid for a box of LSZH Cat6 305m. I've got about 30m left. I decided to replace the mess in the loft as use to have the switch up there but got fed up of the vibration and humming through joists. Everything is now wired directly back to the garage where my homelab is. I've also got a fibre between my main pc and cab in garage just purely due to I already had the fibre left from a job I did a couple of years ago. Fibre is OM3, will probably be barely used but it's there if needed. I've also got a few procurve switches as I like to try things out and bought pre made cat6 patch leads as it was cheaper than my time in terminating 20 cables at each end. I looked at cat7a cable but the price was silly for the benefits. think it was about 400 for a 500m drum of cat 7a excel cable.
My house is all stud walls and didn't have any noggins in due to age and is a bungalow so cabling was really easy, hardest bit was making sure I was actually drilling into the joist for the stud and not going through the ceiling, I did that once and used some 38x25mm trunking to trunk down to behind a tv in the bedroom which covered the hole. I've also got cable basket installed on the uprights in the loft to keep the cables off the floor so they don't get damaged. Again this was took from a strip out that I did and thought i might use that one day.
As for cabling a decent patch panel is a must as cheaper ones the end connectors can splay slightly if you press on at an angle. Decent tools for stripping are essential and i've got a small very sharp pair of cutters to cut the kevlar cord and snip the inner separator. I use a cheap punchdown tool, but change it often,bough 10 for 8 quid off ebay and after a few hundred uses you can see the wear on it. I've got a cheap network tester that works great, but i've also access to a fluke certifier for if I want to certify the cables, completely overkill in a home.
I'm looking at going 10gbe to my servers but the rest of the house is 1gb. All my network sockets are located next to mains sockets, i've also got 2 points in the loft for short patch leads to be passed through for APs which will be powered by POE. I've also got separate cables for my cctv cameras which is wired directly into the NVR. I wish i'd thought more about camera placement and the way the cable runs to them, they're not neat and i've already broken 1 run and had to rerun it. If you are going to run any cable outside ensure you either get UV or duct grade cable as otherwise the sheath does break down and starts cracking, or run normal stuff in trunking/conduit to protect it from the elements.
I didn't have to pull any floorboards, but have done in many installs, and it can soon triple the length of the job. Floorboards themselves are not to bad, but if it's a newer build it'll probably have tongue and groove chipboard which means having to cut into it and hoping there isn't anything underneath when you do. My mate wanted cables to his bedrooms in a 3 story house and after having looked at the walls none lined up but we had the soil pipe boxed in which we used to get to the 1st floor and the 2nd floor was run outside up behind the drainpipe to hide it slightly. I've also routed it round rooms using D line cable trunking as it looks neat and being half round seems to blend in better than traditional trunking. I've also used 16x16mm square trunking for vertical runs in corners of rooms and used decorators caulk to blend it in. Can get 3 cables in fairly easy.
Hope this is some useful info.
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