Any advice from experts or those who have had their house wired for ethernet or a home network?  My house is still under construction and it's a single story without a basement.  I'd like to have it wired to meet my current meager needs but want to keep my options open later on down the road.  I don't have very much experience in networking or cabling/wiring but am willing to listen and learn from those that do. 

My wife works from home and has some basic home office needs like a landline and FAX but I will probably switch to VOIP.  My kids and I play games on a PC and on a few video game consoles.  The TVs in our bedrooms have a Firestick/Roku for streaming movies and everyone in the house uses WIFI on their phones/tablets.  I'll also have a wired camera system installed.

I'd like to focus my efforts (and money) on stuff that needs to get done before I have drywall and insulation to bog me down. 

Figure out where you want everything to go, and do it right with a patch panel.  It's just as easy to pull 2 (or 3) lines to each location as it is 1, and you never know when an extra line would be useful for something down the road.  Figure out where you might want cameras now and have lines pulled to those locations, even if it'll be later before you hook them up.

if I could do it, I would run 2 lines to each room with the other ends going to the same place in the house. Well ventilated, near an a/c duct.
Along with coax.
Plus 4 lines and coax to the outside near where the phone lines come in.

You could put all the ends to where you think a modem will come into the house, or where you might want that, but having an extra line to each room means you can back feed.
same with coax near each line as well.
the 4 to the phone means if you switch to dsl, or voip or fiber, you can then back feed the house for phone and or have lines running in for their stuff instead of having to drop new lines.

Where you pass near or over power, I would use shielded cat 6, and the rest of the house standard cat 6 should be fine.
Also for each wall you could consider a pvc pipe for drops in the future if you need. either power or network. make your life easier later if you need to do a new run.

where they all come together, you could setup a switch, to run all the plugs, or a patch panel to only run the ones you want to have network access. expanding as you need to.
If you do it right, you could do individual switches at each room so each room could expand as necessary as well instead of running more lines.
just depends on where your bottle neck might be.

OST

Runs to each corner of house for cameras.
Run to center of house for a AP (wifi access point)
Run to each tv, computer, printer.

All back to one room.
I get bored. Mess with stuff. Ended up with a server/ camera system and about 8tb of storage.

Access point (not my pic)

I would run CAT6A at this point so you are good for 10G rj45 ethernet connections. Its a lot easier to do it now than upgrading in the future.

i would sat run at least 1 cable to each room minimum and multiple to areas that you may have more then one computer or the home entertainment area.

run the highest rated cable you can. its not that much more to future proof for higher speeds when they come out. ie. cat6 or higher

make sure every run has a service loop so if you need to cut a little off you have enough slack.

plan to add at least 1 if not 2 access points to the ceiling to get best coverage for wifi. so maybe have some cable ran and sicking out a hole when the sheet rock people come through.

There are some really, really good answers above. That will not stop me from sharing though... ;-)

1- DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY TRUST AN "Electrician" FOR DATA CABLE
There are things that electricians 'have always done' that are bad juju for data cable. Pulling hard to get cable through holes, running too close/parallel to high voltage AC, tight bends and too-tight stapling can all degrade or destroy the data carrying capability of your new wires. Some may know what they are doing, but it's not guaranteed.

2- Run all your cables back to a common interconnection point. Bonus points if this is in an unfinished portion of the house so that end of future port expansion is easier.  Put a dedicated power circuit there and plan on putting in a decent UPS to keep your network up through power blips and outages.

2- If it's worth pulling one wire to a drop, it's worth pulling two (or more) .. think... smart TV, xbox, and a player of some sort - that's three connections that may not always be desired in the same side of a room.

3- Put at least two drops in each room - preferably on opposite walls. Personally, I'd put a 4-port drop on each wall, but I'm a tech guy, so YMMV. 

4- Plan on proper wifi access points. (and disable whatever comes pre-activated inside your internet box) Ceilings are the best spots, but each house is different. 

5- Use the best cable and terminations you can get. Not that long ago a 10mb network on slightly upgraded phone wire was state of the art. If you put in Cat 6, use the right terminations, and your wiring guy knows his shit, you are good for at least gigabit ethernet, if not 10g. 

6- Plan on POE capability. It makes installation of access points, security cameras, environmental sensors, etc much simpler. 

7- If you can, have your in-wall data run through good sized flexible conduit. If will make adding other wire later on much, much easier... possible. Who knows when you might need a different kind of wire or fiber or...??

8- LABEL THE DROPS/PORTS ON EACH END

9- Get a NAS box that will work as a DVR for IP security cameras. Don't cheap out - get something decent. I recommend putting this near the service area where your UPS and switch will be. As a bonus, in addition to security footage, it can serve as a family data backup location. 

I would not use shielding for the purpose of isolating the cable from power line EMI.  Siemens recently did a study on this and published the results:  Foil shielding is only useful for noise above a certain frequency.  I can't remember if it's 130 MHz or 300 MHz, but either way, that's out of range for 1000BASE-T.  And I can confirm their assertion due to being able to use my grounded Cat-6A STP as a twin lead AM antenna.  So you should simply keep distance from power lines.

HOWEVER

That it not to say that shielding is completely useless.  Foil shielding is effective in the ranges that 5GBASE-T and 10GBASE-T operate in.  Here's a table to help simplify things, depending on what speed you want.  Remember that Cat cable can always scale down to lower, older speeds for hardware you currently own, if you want to buy faster switches later.

1 Gbps (2.5 Gbps): Cat-5E (unshielded)
1 Gbps (5 Gbps): Cat-6 (maybe shielded)
(10 Gbps): Cat-6A (probably shielded)

Speeds in parenthesis aren't readily available on the consumer market yet, but will be later.  And remember that you can go all out with Cat-6A and still run 10 and 100 Mbps through it.

By the way, if the house is being built, I would setup an in-wall conduit system to be able to easily change these cables out later.  By the time that house is ready to be demolished, somebody's going to want OM fiber in there.  This is doable if there is a crawl space the wiring can run through, but it will be difficult to do it in the attic due to fire codes.  The conduit I am talking about would run from the in-wall box down into the crawl space.  Remember to get boxes big enough (tall) for large cable radius bends.

Many good things are above like pulling a spare wire to each room.  The last thing you want to do is have to put an switch in the room because you only pulled 1 cable to that room and now have your TV, Xbox, Roku that you want to hard wire.  

Another point is think about the future of television and how your signal will get to your TV going forward.  You most likely will have TV's hanging on the wall with no good place to put a box.  It would be much better to have all your cable boxes in a central location and have

them deliver the signal over an Ethernet connection via an extender.  Most "high end" homes are doing it this way now.  Think about VOIP phones as well.

Access points are great so make sure you get one that can cover your whole house.  I put a Ubiquiti at the highest point in my attic pointing down and it offers great coverage all the way out into my yard.

if you dont like/arent able to/etc pull cable later on in your attic - then have them do at least 4 cable to each room/hallway in the house and have them all terminating to a utility closet or room closet big enough to house a wall-mountable server rack as pictured above.

I would recommend that you only add a multi-port transparent bridge to a room if it is designated to need numerous ports or if it's just a pain to run an additional line.

Go with home runs back to a central multi-port transparent bridge and keep it clean rather than just starting with a multi-port transparent bridge in every room as a way to cheese the cabling.

To flesh out Brassburn's comments, here are some specific reasons why this is not a good Plan A.

- Switches take shelf/floor/table space and usually at least one power outlet. (wall-warts tend to cover neighboring outlets)
- Cheap switches often fail early, and not always in a simple, easy to diagnose hard failure
- Good switches are not cheap and are usually bigger
- Your ports are all still in one spot in the room
- If one run gets damaged you can loose an entire room's worth of connections

Yes, it will work, and if you have limited options or high port count needs, this may be the best answer. The OP, however, is able to put in whatever he wants with relative ease. Not doing it right when you have the opportunity is a bit silly.

Transparent Bridges



Switches was a market rename for something no one liked and led to Radia Perlman coming up with STP and creating decades of network misery.



Triggered

The Newegg ratings on the NJ1000 weren't so good, and on Amazon the NJ2000 seem to run about $175-$600, if you can find them. It also looks a LOT like a small switch  transparent bridge wall-mounted over a low voltage drop. I don't think it really qualifies as "In Wall" since it sticks so far out.

Also, according to a 2015 HPE Spec Doc, the product has been retired. 

IMHO, if this is really the best idea to provide what you need, I'd run one wire from the jack to where your devices are and mount a small switch unit on the back of the table or under the shelf. If you want to inject POE from the other end, some of these little ones will run from POE. (one less ugly wire & wall wart) Random examples - not as easy to search for as I thought...
NETGEAR ProSAFE GS105PE
HP 1820 8G, J9979A

I found another little .. um... 'box' that will take power from POE instead of a wall wart.

Well thanks for all of the advice, I ended up doing the network wiring myself.  I ran 2 lines of Cat6 from each gang box except for the study/office where I ran 4 to each box.  I ran some cable to 3 spots (hallway, living room, back porch) where I'll probably place an access point later on.  I had the electrician place conduit in the rooms where I planned to have a wall mounted TV.  I then dropped in some HDMI cables and coax from the wall mounted TV spots to where I plan to place a cable box, gaming console, etc later on.  I mounted a 2x6 in between the studs so I'd have a solid place for the TV mount as well.  All the coax, phone, and Cat6 were home run to a coat closet near my entrance.  I had the alarm company run their cables and the security camera Cat6 to the closet in my master bedroom.  I also had some HDMI run from that closet to the TVs in the living room, master bedroom, and office/study.  

I'll try and post some pictures from my phone in a bit, but be gentle since I've never done any wiring like this before.   

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What's the black stuff in the bottom picture that's in the conduit and separated from AC power by a stud?

Coax and HDMI is in the conduit.  The larger wire outside the conduit is HDMI provided/installed by the security company for the camera NVR.

I ran the Cat6 in a few studs away because of all the electrical there.