Lipstick: A Tool to Mark Electrical Box Location on Drywall

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Lipstick is not just a tool for hot dates. It is your tool of choice for the perfect spot-on mark, indicating electrical box location when installing new drywall!

Marking electrical outlets when hanging new sheetrock is somewhat of an art form. Attempting to measure the location an electrical outlet or light fixture is always error-prone:

1. Walls are rarely straight.
2. Measurements can get mixed up, especially when you are marking a ceiling piece
3. All too often a box gets cut too large…or is marked just off so you have to cut out more on one side.

Those sheets of drywall get heavy fast. Lifting a sheet of drywall up and down to perfect an electrical outlet opening is NOT an option.

Clearly, measuring is NOT the way to go.

Applying lipstick around the outside facing edge of a box is the perfect way to mark the location of the electrical boxes on the back side of the drywall. This way, the electrical outlets are marked as soon as you dry fit the piece of drywall in the proper place. Lipstick takes all of the guesswork out of marking the boxes.

Tools for this project:

• cheapo lipstick
• pencil or pen
• drywall saw

Sample electrical outlet location in the ceiling before hanging drywall. Can you spot the two blue boxes?

Apply lipstick to the front edge of the electrical box. Then press out the drywall against the ceiling or wall in order to mark where you need to cut a hole.

Sample lipstick print marking the location of an electrical outlet on new drywall.

Fill in the gaps in the lipstick template with pencil or pen.

After filling in the gaps between the lipstick template on the drywall marking electrical outlets.

Cut the lipstick template around the electrical outlet with a drywall saw.

There are times when you don’t get the perfect mark. As you can see below, there is only one splooge of lipstick on the left side of this light box. Option #1 of putting the drywall back up on the ceiling was something that was NOT appealing given the time of night (and in all reality should not be option #1 during a decent hour of the day either).

Sample of a bad mark, which can be overcome with a template–be it the cutout of another outlet or another blue box that isn’t attached to the wall.

In this case, I had cut out the nicely marked outlet of similar size first. So I used the cutout as a template in order to make the remainder of the mark as you saw above:

After: a nice, tight and clean couple of electrical outlets in the ceiling drywall using the lipstick template method.

Last, celebrate another job well done!

Shiner Day Quencher is a good choice.

There are some drawbacks to using lipstick to mark electrical outlet location:

1. You can’t store your lipstick in the tool bag. Since I’d recommend going out for the .99 kind (not the fancypants Maybelline lip stain we had on hand at this latest job site), it’s plastic cover will not survive an impact with the ground or other heavy tools around it.
2. Your lipstick can’t stay in the back of your truck bed (or in the cab without the air conditioning running) in the summer otherwise it turns into a pool of goo.