Want to know how to remove a phone jack? Unless you bought a new construction house from within the last five-ish years, the house you bought came complete with a sweet phone jack hookup for your land line telephone.
Awesome! That’ll come in handy when you have some “Back to the Future” ordeal and need to call your Liz Frank ’90s loving self while twirling a phone cord around your finger.
Home landlines are dead, but the ugly phone jack is still there.
Luckily, they are easy enough to remove and patch drywall over and you’ll never know it was there!
Shop drywall patch kit
How to remove a phone jack from a wall
The first thing I did was remove the plate on the front of the jack, which exposes the wiring.
I cut off the power to the jack and popped out the power cords that were connecting it.
Then I used electrical tape to wrap up each of the two cords just to make sure they didn’t touch anything and pushed them into the electrical box in the wall. Out of sight, out of mind.
Next came patching the wall. This awesome drywall patch kit comes with a 4″x4″ steel mesh patch, lightweight spackle and a putty knife.
It’s perfect for this type of job. The patch sticks to the wall with a built-in adhesive.
Here are the best drywall patch kits!
Next, lather up your spackle on the wall and smooth it out over the edges and let dry.
This kit even came with a nice sanding block to smooth everything out once dry.
Finally, paint over the newly spackled area and voila you can’t even tell that the ’90s existed.
Patching drywall over an old phone socket is simple and easy and can be done quickly.
It’s a quick and easy upgrade that makes your home look much more up to the times.
What to do with old phone jacks in house
Not sure what to do with your old phone jack? Here are a few ideas:
- Remove and patch them following the above tutorial
- Hang a piece of art such as a canvas over it
- Replace it with a flat outlet cover blank wall plate
- Move a piece of furniture in front of it
How to remove phone jack from wall
Hate the old phone jacks in your wall? If you don't want a landline ever again, here is how to remove it and patch the drywall.
Materials
- Electrical tape
- Drywall patch kit
- Paint
Tools
- Exacto knife or blade
- Screwdriver or drill
Instructions
- Use a razor blade to score the paint around the panel.
- Unscrew the panel and pull from the wall.
- Pull out the cords and cover the ends with electrical tape.
- Push the cords into the hole in the wall.
- Use the drywall patch kit to patch the hole. Attach the mesh, and then spackle over the patch.
- Sand and wipe clean.
- Paint to match your walls.
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MrO
Wednesday 4th of August 2021
Looks great, but I'm not sure what you meant by "cut the power". Do you mean disconnecting the old phone line at the outside telephone interface? Or the line voltage in your house? I can't tell from the photos; is there a black (or red) hot wire and white neutral wire, or just telephone wires? I'm used to seeing gray ones. It would be important to make clear to other readers that a junction box with live line voltage wires (not dead phone wires) must be accessible (i.e. with a blank cover plate) and must NOT be covered with drywall or otherwise permanently enclosed, and wire ends capped.
Morgan
Wednesday 4th of August 2021
Hi, so this comment is a little all over, but overall, we said turn off the power because we didn't know at the time what all was behind there. There were no live power wires that needed to be accessible after the fact. We wrapped electrical tape around the dead phone wire, just to be safe.
Diane
Monday 15th of February 2021
I removed phone, stuffed wires in and patched. It looks great but our other lines don’t work. Is this because of what I did or another problem?
Morgan
Monday 15th of February 2021
Hmmm, I'm not sure why they would be related, however I'm not a phone line guy. Our house only had the one phone line and I just wrapped it up and put it in the hole with no issues.
Donna
Thursday 4th of April 2019
Hi,
I would like a wall pass-through where the phone jack resides. Is this possible?
Sean
Thursday 4th of April 2019
Hey Donna! It's certainly possible, but you'll have to do this a little differently. You're going to need to remove the whole box (as you'll be removing a section of wall) and you'll need to just drop the phone line down into the wall when you've cut it all open.
Amanda
Friday 17th of November 2017
Hi! I'm a little confused about how you "cut" the wires??? Is a phone wire like an electrical wire, with a charge? What do you cut and do I need to turn anything off to do it?
Morgan
Monday 20th of November 2017
Hi Amanda! We don't have phone service in our house so I didn't even address this but no it doesn't have a charge. Still, best practice is to wrap the ends of any exposed wires with electrical tape. :) Good luck!
Crystal
Friday 10th of November 2017
Hi Sean!
Thanks for the helpful information! My situation is a little different. I have an older home, built in the late '50s and the old telephone jacks in the bedrooms are causing the issue. The phone cable is very low on the wall, only about 1 - 1 1/2 inches from the floor and the wires come straight out of a small hole (only big enough for the wires). I really doubt there is an electrical box behind the drywall. So I don't believe the electrical tape and tucking would work/be safe in this scenario. The length of the wire is not long enough to just raise the phone boxes above the new base board plus I would REALLY like to just eliminate them all together. How can I safely remove/hide these cables to finish the base board? I appreciate your help, thanks!
Sean
Monday 13th of November 2017
That is a very interesting situation. So you're saying that the phone line and the power line for the phone are just coming straight through the drywall? I personally don't think it would be an issue to just heavily wrap them in electrical tape and push them in, but that would be what you are comfortable with. Conversely, if you're going to cover with baseboard, you could just wrap them in electrical tape and hide them behind the baseboard. If they are wrapped, you shouldn't have any issues.