The kitchen that didn't have to be torn out

The kitchen was finished: solid ash, a marble worktop, crisply painted. Four months later fresh holes appeared in the wood. Active woodworm — carried in with a batch of ash that, according to the supplier, had been treated and was safe. The client, a young family, understandably wanted no chemical pest control in their home. And above it all hung the question nobody wanted to ask out loud: does all of this have to come out again?

Specialist companies existed, but the quotes ran into thousands of euros and the marble top was a risk item in every scenario. There is another way, known from the restoration world: heat. Woodworm — the larvae and the eggs — does not survive once the core of the wood spends half an hour above 58 degrees. But wood that is heated too fast or too dry warps and cracks. Exactly what you don't want in a kitchen with months of work in it.

So I didn't tear the kitchen out — I wrapped it up: airtight, in place, inside the home. Two electric heaters on the kitchen's own three-phase socket, a steam generator next to them, and measuring points everywhere: four temperature probes deep in the wood at strategic spots, humidity and temperature sensors inside and out, and a self-built pitot tube measuring the airflow. The controls: the same software that also runs heat pumps and chargers — Homer, with a control scheme I wrote specifically for this.

The process is slow, and that is the point. Heating at two to three degrees per hour, while steam keeps the humidity constant so the wood doesn't dry out. Then waiting until every probe in the wood has spent thirty minutes above 58 degrees — it's not the room that counts, it's the core. And then cooling down just as deliberately, in stages: first recirculating over a water-cooled convector, then outside air, tap water last. Meanwhile the pitot tube calculates how much moisture is being extracted; the log records when each core reached temperature.

I sat next to it that weekend. Plenty didn't go right the first time — a steam generator that quit for over an hour, a control loop that cooled too enthusiastically — and that is exactly why everything was built so I could restart from where the process had left off.

The woodworm is dead. The kitchen is still standing, the marble is intact, and not a drop of poison was involved. The fault came from outside; the solution could come from within, because furniture making and measurement-and-control happen to live in the same house here. Neither craft on its own could have solved it this way.