Studio 1: Studio Switch

We're doing some work in what will be the music studio- some light soundproofing and general nice-making for what was a very bare-bones space badly in need of some TLC. It used to be a storage room, so whatever work was done up there was naturally a little slapdash.

I realized there was no current in this outlet. So I took the facing off and found two green wires- not standard. I asked my local hardware guys, who said to take it off the wall and check behind it. There were just two dead green wires sticking out of the wall.

The same dead, green wires were inside the awkward wire tube sticking out of the base of the wall. Whoever installed it didn't feel like moving the baseboard, so this was what they came up with. And then when the re-wiring was done, they didn't bother removing the old wires at all. Once we knew it was a relic, I was thrilled to be able to just hack it out of the wall and seal the hole up with compound.

  

Then I looked behind the light switch near the door, which also seemed to be a relic from when the room was shaped differently. It was wedged against the door frame at an odd angle, so I took the switch off. The base plate seemed weirdly...melty. And it had a big hole in it. So I took it off, and found more dead, green wires. It seemed obvious that these had at one point run through the hole in the plate, and probably caused the meltiness. 

   

And because this used to be just a storage room, when they re-wired the house, they just used the old base plate, running wires over the door with a really ugly wire guide, as you can see below.

So it seemed there was no good reason for the light switch (and now the only plug) to be jammed up against the door frame like that. I got a new wire guide, a new base plate, and moved it under the junction box.

And then the light switch was like "BOOM! I'm over here now!"