Another part of the house puzzle is that I want to have networking in the home without running cables everywhere, so I ordered some of the Netgear HDX101 Powerline HD Ethernet Adapters.

Wow am I impressed. Plug them in to a couple of wall sockets (preferably a couple of rooms apart of course), and then plug your Ethernet cable into the side. Done. It's that easy to get it set up.

I haven't tested the speed yet, but I haven't noticed things feeling particularly slow compared, say, to my 100MBps switch (the units work at 200MBps, effectively Full-Duplex Ethernet speed).