Why bother? It really is much nicer when your cables are the right length, so you don’t have unruly spools of unneeded cable everywhere. After a recent rewire, my server closet was a real cabling disaster. Also, it’s way more cost effective if you’re talking lots of cables.

Lessons:

• you don’t really need a cable tester. At least the simple kind I got wasn’t even that helpful — it gave a passing score to a cable that wouldn’t reliably work. Just plug it into your network & see if it transfers a big file properly. (If I’m missing something here, speak up!)
• a good wire cutter is absolutely essential. My crimper has a decent little cutter built in that’s just the right size, which is handy.
• T568B is what you want unless you have some weird situation
• Never realized how I’ve taken patch cables for granted, even in my days of installing servers. I guess Willy must have made sure we had a common supply, but I can’t really recall.