Hello, I just moved into this house and it’s a pretty major work in progress. One thing that’s perplexed me though is the front door.

We have a light switch inside that no one knows what it actually does. It’s right inside the door but it doesn’t turn on the porch light. That one is on the other side of the room.

We had a contractor over giving us quotes to install stairs and I asked his opinion. He pointed out the white around the door is not wood but a barely transparent plastic. He’s pretty sure it’s supposed to light up and the reason the switch doesn’t work is because the bulbs are probably burnt.

Issue with that is that I can’t find a way in to check that. It definitely is a very fragile plastic. Wouldn’t take much to break. But I’d like to not break it so I can replace the lights and put it back together. But I don’t see screws or anything. Anyone have any advice?

  • BrainisfineIthink
    5•8 months ago

    Have an electrician come map your outlets. They find the connections in the breaker panel, then they trace them out to figure out where they go and what they do. Your contractor may be right, but as someone that bought a house that’s over 100 years old, it’s just as likely that the switch goes nowhere/isn’t live, or powers something you’d NEVER think of, or powers something that you can’t even see because someone put a drywall facade over it or some other weirdness!

    We discovered that we had a LIVE outlet, under our living room floor. For some reason, at some point someone decided that needed an outlet literally in the middle of the living room floor (coffee table lame is my guess). The previous owner/flipper put feaux-hardwood laminate down in the whole house and instead of deactivating it, they just put the flooring right over the top of it and its live 100 year old cloth wrapped wires, leaving us a lovely little fire hazard! That outlet was controlled by, you guessed it, the mystery switch on the wall next to the front door that didn’t seem to do anything.