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.
