Picture a kitchen that’s barely a year old. Smart, clean, marble-effect splashback and matching compact laminate worktops - the lot. Then one corner starts to look… wrong. The crisp edge by the worktop has gone soft and lumpy, the joint has lifted, and what used to be a sharp and crisp line is now a swollen, blistered mess. On a kitchen that new, it’s about the last thing you expect to be looking at.

That is exactly what greeted us on this job in Dorchester. And the cause was no great mystery once we got up close. The splashback was made of MDF — and MDF, sat in the hottest, steamiest, wettest corner of the house with water quietly finding its way past a poorly sealed joint, behaves precisely how you would fear. It drinks. It swells. It blisters. The only real surprise was how quickly it had happened.