Sorry to bring this thread back, but I felt the need to update it now that the home has been officially purchased and my mom will be moving in tomorrow. I was finally able to look at the wiring for more than a couple minutes and have pretty much figured out at least what I need to do to correct things, even if I'm not so sure why things are the way they are at present.

First off, take all that stuff I said about the speaker system out of the equation entirely. It's a completely different set of wires. Simply speaker wires throughout the house.

I've attached pictures of the wiring and an example outlet that's actually directly below the main jumble of wires.

First off, I pretty much have a full count of Cat5e wires coming out of the ceiling. I count about 9 jacks in the home, and 9 or 10 wires total. These wires all come out of the ceiling, travel behind the wood panel attached to the studs, and back up the bottom front of the panel and into a patchblock (I guess). The really confusing thing to me is that every single cable only has 2 of 4 pairs terminated in the block. The other 2 pairs are simply wrapped back down around the cable as pictured.

But after seeing this I decided hey, that's fine, I'll just snip everything, run it back up a little ways to give me some slack, put some RJ45 caps on the ends, and plug them all into a switch.

The only thing I'm worried about at this point is whether all the actual jacks in the house are wired correctly. I worry whether all the pairs are terminated or if they're in the right order.

Anyway, I felt I should update this post. If you can think of anything at all that I might be overlooking, I'd appreciate a heads up. I'll be looking at a few of the wall jacks tomorrow and putting some of those caps on. Wish me luck!