This hidden junction was discovered after stripping off several layers of wallpaper:



Yes, that's right -- The wires were just "choc blocked" and stuffed into the wall with no box, then the hole covered over with wallpaper!


There was once a vanity basin here:


Just down inside that top left hole was a cut-off length of heavy flex:


My guess is that this spur and flex once fed a small water heater over the basin. The round hole below the spur outlet is probably where the flex was threaded back into the wall from the face plate. (A definite no-no, of course.)

What about when the spur was disconnected though? There's a rectangular area which escaped the green paint, along with four holes in its corners, so had a home-made blanking plate been attached over this at one time?


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-24-2004).]

Oh well... In our hallway we did have boxes, but no covers either. Just four layers of wallpaper. Covers got lost at some point, I still found the nail holes, so they must have been there once. I replicated some of the old metal covers and replaced them. Our old junction box covers were just hand-cut pieces of thin sheet metal with 2 or 5 holes drilled into them, depending on the cover size. The two holes were in a horizontal row in the center opf the cover, the 5 were four in a rectangle and the fifth dead center.