Surprisingly Easy Faux Hardwired Wall Sconce Hack You Can Do Now

Upgrade the lighting in your home with the easy plug in wall sconce DIY hack. No one will ever be able to tell you’re using a plug in light.

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Have you ever had a room that lacked hardwired lighting? No ceiling light, no wall lights? Nada? We did. Apparently lighting wasn’t an important design aspect back in the early 2000s when building houses.

We have two rooms in our home that have no hardwired lighting. One was our study turned guest room, which I solved by adding some bedside table lamps. The other was our playroom, and a bit trickier to figure out.

Lighting Options

This room would become so dark in the evening that my kids couldn’t see to play in it, which kinda defeats the purpose of a playroom right? I tested out a few ideas that didn’t work out well at all for this space. One was floor lamp (totally unsafe and unstable on carpet). The other was a DIY wall sconce hack that involved using puck lights.

Puck lights are those round hockey puck shaped lights that you can stick underneath cabinets or in small spaces for some quick direct lighting. It’s a great idea in theory and I might just try it in another project, but the dim pucks weren’t enough to light up this room.

I was also less than thrilled with only being able to find the cool white LED options. I love a good warm bright white light and I’m a bit of a light bulb snob.

I finally settled on this faux hardwired wall sconce hack and I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to come up with this idea. About a year and a half to be exact.

Genius Idea for a plug in wall sconce diy hack

I convinced my husband to mount the lights directly onto the wall and hide the cord by drilling a hole in the wall to run and hide the wiring. Similar to how you mount a TV on the will and feed the wiring behind it.

Full disclosure: this is not code compliant, so please decide if this is best for you.

Just like all our projects, I had to give my hubby the “you can do it” pep talk to help me out. I think he was concerned about a fire hazard, but these lights are designed to be directly mounted onto the wall and don’t require an electric housing for the wiring. So it was totally safe, and he jumped on board, after a lot of pleading.

Step 1 – Decide on your light placement

We chose to install these lights directly above our kids’ photos, but the trick to making this faux hardwired light look like the real thing is to choose an inconspicuous place where you can hide the end of your cord that plugs into the outlet. You’ll have hole in the bottom of the wall for the plug to exit and then plug the cord into your outlet.

I knew the bottom portion of our wall was going to be covered by furniture in the playroom so I didn’t care too much about how far away the hole it was from the actual outlet.

So if you choose to install your plug in wall sconces with this method, be sure to think through how the wiring and plug will look at the bottom of your wall. Maybe you can get creative and hide it with a nightstand or other small furniture.

Step 2 – Cut your holes

 Now I’m not going to use super technical tool terms here, because, well, I don’t really know them. But the next step is to cut both of your holes in the wall. You’ll use this hole saw bit attached to a drill and place it directly onto the wall to begin cutting. It cuts a perfect circular piece of drywall that pops right out to reveal a nice clean hole.

The top hole will be centered directly where you intend to install your sconce lighting.

The bottom hole will be directly underneath of this at the bottom of your wall. This will allow you to feed your wire and plug straight down behind the wall for it to exit at the bottom.

Step 3 – Run your wiring

You might find it easy to use a fish tape (it’s a legit tool name I promise) to insert your wiring into the top hole and run it all the way down to pull it through the bottom hole. From here you’ll just pull out your cord as far as you need it to extend to reach the outlet. *note – DON’T plug it in yet and shock your husband, but if you do, it’ll just be a little tingle and he’ll forgive you eventually.

Step 4 – Mount your Wall Scone

If you’ve made it this far you’re almost there I promise! Follow the instructions in your lighting kit to mount the lighting plate directly onto the wall. Typically, all of your hardware is included, but what we found is that you’ll need to swap out the screws for the mounting bracket to shorter ones. This is because a lot of these lights are designed to be mounted inside an electrical box and by installing it directly on the wall it doesn’t require super long screws.

Step 5 – Light it up!

Ok, now you can go ahead and plug in your new light to test it out. I tried to get a shot of my light all lit up, but it blurred out the pic.

You get the idea though.

I still can’t believe it took me such a long time to figure out this lighting hack. I love how it turned out though and I’m super excited to try this project out next to a bed somewhere in my house. I think it’ll make for some awesome bedside task lighting.

Tools used in this project

• saw hole drill bit
• fish tape
• power drill

pin this project for later

What do you think friends? Would you try faux hardwired wall sconce hack out in your own home? If so, drop me a comment and tell me where you’d put them! I hope you loved this DIY wall sconce hack and I am so thankful you dropped my post to check out this tutorial.