An older house, so we don't have network wall faceplates around the house.  Nor we do have a metal cabinet in the garage.  How important is a patch panel? 

We only wired up the 3 bedrooms upstairs, 2 network cables per room - a corridor cupboard has a 8 port network switch.  Only 2 or the 3 rooms use network cables and often they only use 1 network cable.  Then one cable from the network switch to the lounge (outside of the house) to the back of the TV where the ONT and ISP router.  What are your views on a patch panel?  We've never needed anything like HDMI Cat6 runs. 

Only one issue is I might need to recrimp one cable as it's a bit loose b/c the bedrooms only use 1 network cable they could just switch to to the other port on the wall faceplate. So if we do get a patch panel it's just going to sit inside by the wall of the corridor cupboard but we won't have a cabinet type of setup.  Due to the cupboard is used for storage.