Uncovering a buried electrical box

Sometimes home improvement means undoing someone else’s mistake. Recently I found a kind of buried treasure: an electrical box with live wires right where I needed an outlet. It was hidden in plain sight. Let me explain.

We have a small living room, so to free up floor space I’ve been working on mounting our TV on the wall, above the fireplace. If you’re interested, there’s a lively online debate about whether TVs belong above fireplaces. I may write another post detailing the arguments, but for now you can find them summarized here. Suffice it to say that above the fireplace is not ideal but sometimes it’s an acceptable compromise.

Anyway, I was trying to locate the studs, if there were studs, above the mantel. A TV is, of course, heavy, probably the heaviest thing that most of us will hang on a wall, so it needs to be anchored to wooden studs. I found one stud on center that could be a good anchor for the mount.

But my magnetic stud finder discovered something else that was a little strange. The wall is textured, but just to the left of the stud was an area about two inches by three inches that had been patched smooth. My magnet grabbed the edges of that patched part and held on tight.

What was going on in there? That a standard electrical box is 2 x 3 was a pretty good clue. Beyond that, well, I asked around for advice but the bottom line is that it’s pretty hard to see through walls. 

I might have stopped there and not torn a hole in the middle of the living room wall, except that I actually wanted an electrical outlet in that location. With an outlet, I could hide the TV cords behind the screen instead of snaking them down around the fireplace to the outlet near the floor. And honestly, I was curious: had someone actually buried live wires in the wall, Edgar Allan Poe style? So I dug in.

I had to proceed carefully. First I turned off the power at the breaker box. Next I tried to identify the edges of the box as well as I could with my magnet. Then I drilled an exploratory hole at what I thought was the edge of the box. In fact the bit went just outside of it, so I drilled another hole next to the first one, inside the box.

Opening up the rest of the box wasn’t pretty or speedy. I had a small pointed multi-saw blade and I sawed out, little by little, trying to be as cautious as I could so I didn’t nick any wires. Later I got a wallboard saw that went a little faster.

When I had a corner of the patch broken away, I was able to see wire caps. Interesting! Sure enough, behind the wall was a box with all the wires needed for an outlet. When I restored the power and held my electrical tester to the hot wire, it lit up to say that the wire was live. I bought an outlet and a grounding wire and hooked up the power. My TV and Roku are plugged in there right now.

I’m not sure why a previous owner covered up the box. As I understand it, the electrical code prohibits this practice because someone could easily nail or saw into a live wire without knowing it was there. Possibly the buriers thought of that possibility, because they put this odd brick-like piece behind the patch.

Besides being unsafe, the burying just seems unnecessary. That spot is convenient for an outlet, and if you didn’t want one, you could just put a flat plate over it, paint the plate the color of the wall, and place some tchotchke on the mantel to cover it. Then again, I would have missed out on this unusual wall-breaking adventure.