Reader Challenge: What To Do With Exposed Junction Boxes?

Alright, Charles and Hudson readers, I need your sage advice. I have an issue with my two upstairs bedroom light junction boxes and I'm hoping you can help me out.

See it? See how the junction boxes literally hang out of my ceiling and into the rooms? It's been driving me crazy and I can't come up with a viable solution to solve it. So I'm hoping you brilliant readers can come up with options I wouldn't even begin to think of.

The greater issue is this -- both junction boxes in the upstairs bedrooms are attached directly to the bottom of a beam that runs the entire length of my house. The ceilings are also plaster, which means there are lathe slats EVERYWHERE and it makes it really difficult to find really anything above the junction box without tearing half of the ceiling down. On top of that, to move the electrical to either side of the beam would most likely cause the plaster to collapse as it's visibly cracked throughout both rooms -- which belong to my kids, so redoing the electrical in the near entire upstairs really isn't an option.

But I can't stand looking at it any longer. I've researched to see if there are ceiling medallions that would cover it, but most are flush mount at the center. I know there are shallow depth junction boxes available, but I believe that's actually what we installed when we went to install the light you see in the photos. We just didn't notice the issue at first because the previous homeowners had flush mount lights that hid the boxes better (and I'm not really keen on having to replace our perfectly good fixtures for this seemingly silly issue).

I've been stewing over this problem for almost four years and am yet to come up with a viable solution. I'm just at a loss on what to do, so I thought you lovely readers might be able to come up with something creative to help me out. Please fire away in the comments!

Tabatha Muntzinger | Comments () |

HomeConstructionImprovement

Definitely get a pancake box and life will be right again!

Lindsey

If you find a cheap medallion, you can also cut out the center, but that would also require taking the lighting down and futzing with it until it looks right. So definitely check into a flatter junction box. That would drive me crazy too!

lj

and based on the images, it looks like you are using a standard junction box, so a pancake style one should allow your fixture to sit flush

lj

They make junction boxes for this. google for "pancake junction box" and you'll see that they are much shallower than standard boxes.

Brad Hoblit

If you're handy with a jigsaw (aka sabresaw, scroll saw) and a router, you can make an attractive medallion of your own. Use MDF, or similar product, because it is stable and easy to cut and paint. You can get varied thicknesses, or glue them to desired thickness With the saw, you can make it round, octagonal, or about any shape you want. A well-chosen router bit will put an elegant edge profile on it, and voila! You're ready to paint and install your classy, hand-made, custom-fit, last-a-lifetime solution.