A hundred and fifty years of walnut. The failure mode nobody checks for is not scratches or sun, it is something living inside it.
I buy a lot of old furniture, and I have learned to do one thing at a fair or an estate sale that almost nobody else does. Before I look at the proportions, before I look at the colour, I turn the piece over and look at the underside.
What I am looking for is holes.
Wood-boring insects are the quiet way good furniture is lost. Not sun damage, not a ring from a glass, not a wobbly joint. Those are all fixable and mostly cosmetic. An active infestation in a piece of solid wood is structural, it is progressive, and by the time you can see it from the front it has usually been going on for years.
The two problems, and they are different
People say termites and mean any insect in wood. It is worth separating them, because the response is not the same.
Termites are a building problem that furniture catches. They come up through soil, they work through framing, subfloor and skirting, and they reach furniture when it makes contact with an infested surface. A chest of drawers standing against a wall with termites in it, or a table leg sitting on a damp floor, is how they get in. They eat along the grain and leave the surface intact, which is why a leg can look completely sound and crush under pressure.
Wood-boring beetles, which in Britain everyone calls woodworm, are a furniture problem in their own right. Powderpost beetles are the common culprit in hardwoods. The adult lays eggs in the pores of bare wood, the larvae eat their way through it for two to five years, and then they emerge, which is when the holes appear. The holes are the exit, not the entry, and that distinction matters more than anything else in this piece.
What to actually look for
Turn the piece over. Everything useful is on the underside, the back panel and the inside of the drawer runners, because that is where the wood is unfinished. A polished surface is not attractive to a beetle; raw wood is.
- Exit holes. Clean, round, roughly the size of a pinhead up to about a sixteenth of an inch. Sharp-edged and pale inside means recent. Dark, dusty and softened at the edge means old.
- Frass. This is the one that tells you whether it is active. Fine powder, the consistency of talc, in small piles under the holes or in the drawer below. Blow it away, mark the date, come back in a fortnight. Fresh frass means something is still in there.
- Blistered or rippled surfaces. Termites hollow wood from within, so the surface can lift or feel papery over a void.
- Sound. Tap along a leg or a stretcher with a knuckle. Solid wood is dull and dense. A hollow, drummy note means the inside has gone.
- Mud tubes. Pencil-width soil tunnels on masonry, foundations or the back of a plinth. That is subterranean termites, and it is a house problem before it is a furniture problem.
Old holes are not a reason to walk away
This is where people lose good pieces for no reason.
A great deal of genuine antique furniture carries historic beetle damage. The infestation ran its course decades ago, the wood dried below the moisture level the larvae need, and it stopped. Dark, dusty, softened holes with no frass are a record of something that happened, not something happening. Some of the best pieces I own have them.
What matters is whether it is active now, and whether the structure is sound. A chair with historic flight holes in a rail is fine. A chair whose rail crushes when you press it is firewood with a nice colour. This is exactly the kind of judgement that separates buying antiques well from buying them nervously, which I have written about in mixing modern and vintage.
Quarantine anything that comes in
The single most useful habit, and it costs nothing.
Anything solid wood that arrives from a fair, a barn, an auction or a relative's house does not go straight into a room with the rest of your furniture. It sits somewhere isolated for a few weeks with a sheet of white paper underneath it. If there is anything active, powder appears on the paper and you have found out before it spread to the piece next to it.
Beetles will happily move from an infested chair into a sound floor. That is a considerably worse afternoon.
The conditions matter more than the treatment
Wood-boring insects need moisture in the timber. Below roughly eleven percent moisture content most larvae cannot develop, which is why heated houses in dry climates rarely see fresh activity and why unheated outbuildings, damp garages and cool north-facing rooms are where problems start.
So the practical protections are dull ones. Keep indoor humidity steady rather than swinging. Do not store good furniture in a garage or an unheated barn, even briefly. Keep wooden legs off damp concrete and out of contact with skirting on an exterior wall. Fix the leak before you worry about the chest of drawers.
Warm, humid regions are a different proposition. In the Florida panhandle and the wider Gulf South, pests never really go dormant, and the region carries both subterranean and drywood termites, which is a combination only a handful of states deal with. Annual monitoring is a normal running cost there rather than a reaction to a problem, and it is worth budgeting the way you would budget servicing anything else. Companies offering pest control in Tallahassee and comparable climates will generally quote termite monitoring as an annual plan rather than a call-out, and bundling it with general treatment usually costs less than buying the two separately.
The comparison worth making is not the annual figure against zero. It is the annual figure against replacing a floor, or against a piece of furniture that cannot be replaced at all.
When to stop and call someone
Surface treatments sold for woodworm do something to larvae near the surface and very little to anything deep in the timber, and they will damage a shellac or wax finish on their way to failing.
Get a professional involved when frass is still appearing after you have cleaned it away, when more than one piece in a room is affected, when the damage is in something structural rather than something you can carry, or when the piece is valuable enough that a bad treatment is its own kind of loss. For genuinely good furniture, a conservator rather than a general treatment is often the right call, since the objective is to stop the infestation without stripping the surface that makes the piece worth keeping.
Any of this applies just as much to reclaimed timber brought into a renovation, incidentally. Salvage is wonderful and I use it constantly, but it comes from somewhere, and reusing old furniture in a new scheme is a lot happier when what you have brought in is not carrying anything. Same with reclaimed wood flooring, where the boards arrive in far greater quantity.
The short version
Turn it over. Round holes plus fresh powder means active, dark holes with no powder means historic and probably fine. Quarantine anything new on white paper for a few weeks. Keep good wood warm, dry and off damp floors. And when it is structural, or when the piece is genuinely good, hand it to somebody who does this for a living.
Furniture that has survived a century and a half deserves better than being eaten in your dining room.
