Home network and cat-6 question

I am starting to think about a wired network in my home but have a general question based on my particular setup. My home is wired for cat6 but all the phone jacks are standard (my understanding is that the simply didn't connect 2 of the wires but if I ever wanted to be able to plug in an ethernet cord I could simply pull out the standard phone jack, hook up the wider jack and plug in the wider cord.

However, here's my question. My office (main computer) has the ethernet cord coming out of the wall going into the modem. Suppose I put a new PC in another room. Could I just plug an ethernet cord into the wall and it would "find" the network? Or, do I have to harwire every PC all the way back to the router. In other words, can I take advantage of the house being wired for cat6?

It really depends on how the house was wired. If were to wire a house with cat 6 for phones and ethernet, I'd home run everything back to a central location with patch panels for each phone and ethernet.

That way, if you wanted to convert a phone jack to a network jack, you would just need to reterminate the jack on the end, find the opposite end of the cable on the patch panel, move it over to the other patch panel, and hook it up to your switch from there. It might not be a patch panel for the phones, it could be a simple 110 block, or they could even exist on the same patch panel. It really depends on how it was installed.

It's rather hard for me to fathom someone using Cat6 for phones and not laying it out in a similar manner, to make it easy to transition to packet-based traffic. The jist of it to find the far end of the cable you're working with, and make sure that's getting into your switch. A tone generator and probe are invaluable for tracing poorly labelled cable.