Old Home Wiring Replacement

Do you have an older home? Do you have older electrical wiring such as knob and tube wiring or BX wiring?

Perfect! You’ve come to the right place!

Kuhlman Electrical Services specializes in wiring replacements in existing homes (also known as “old work” installations). We offer our rewiring services to all of eastern Massachusetts—from Worcester to the Coast and Newburyport to the Cape. YES, we cover a lot of ground!

We’ve been rewiring homes for decades now, and we’ve developed great methods for performing this work while making the smallest amount of damage to the house. So we take our time planning out wire runs and making the fewest number of holes possible. Our team especially loves trickier homes—the ones that make us think outside the box a bit to route the wiring around. No matter what your situation is, we’re up to the challenge!

One of my favorite older-home rewires we ever did was in Worcester at the beginning of 2018. This home was built in the early 1900s, and it still had a good amount of knob and tube wiring remaining.

This house had something we hadn’t seen up until that point: Swedish fabric ceilings! Yes, that’s right. Instead of having a typical lath and plaster ceiling from this era, this home was built with fabric ceilings. You honestly couldn’t tell it was fabric just by looking at it. You had to push it and watch it ripple across the ceiling toward the crown molding and walls in all directions.

The owners of this house were very proud of their ceilings, and they certainly didn’t want to ruin them or put holes in them. So we had to take great care and do things a bit differently, in order to rewire this home without poking ANY holes in the ceilings. This house was a fun one for sure!

It was pretty funny: The owner said they couldn’t find an electrician who would touch their house until they found us. But we were up the challenge!! And yes, we successfully rewired the house without damaging the cloth ceilings!

That house was a good example of a really tricky job we took on with great confidence and eagerness to make it work. While most homes don’t pose those kinds of challenges, we don’t want you to think we don’t rewire the “easier” homes too! You may ask, “What’s an easier home?”

Easier homes have an unfinished basement AND an unfinished attic. When you have unfinished spaces above and below a living space, it makes access to those living spaces MUCH easier. These homes usually have a chase, chimney, or stack pipe that runs from the basement to the attic. Any of these options gives us a great way to run new circuits from the panel to the new outlets/lights. All these factors result in the easier homes we deal with.

All of the homes that have knob and tube wiring or BX wiring (otherwise known as early armored cable) have lath and plaster walls/ceilings. We specialize in the ability to carefully deal with these walls/ceilings without them falling apart. But I will say that SOME homes have ceilings that are already cracking/falling apart, so any further holes will cause them to keep degrading.

Here are some other challenges in older homes we work with:

  • Large crown moldings
  • Tin ceilings (which are cool and not super common!)
  • LARGE Victorian-era homes
  • Wallpaper
  • Antique lights
  • Homes from the 1700s (which are fun!) and 1800s

Quick Note:

Homes from the 1700's

You may be wondering, “Since electricity hadn’t been invented at that time, how do these homes have older types of wiring?” They had knob and tube or BX wiring installed when they were remodeled during the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Homes from the 1700s homes are very challenging. That’s for sure.

During the last home we rewired, we started joking around. It seemed like they had extra wood when they were building the home and randomly stuck it in the walls and ceiling. In other words, these homes make it really tough to fish wiring!

When we say we specialize in rewiring older homes, we mean it.

We spend a tremendous amount of time training our electricians on how to handle special circumstances. We also make sure our office staff visits jobs from time to time, so they can visualize how these jobs work when they’re speaking to customers. We take PRIDE in being the #1 residential electrician in Massachusetts!

We promise you won’t find an electrical company more excited about rewiring your home!

Please find more information about specific wiring types on other pages of this website. They include:

The History of Electrical Wiring