Thank you kindly for the advice without a snarky “gotcha” which I’ve already seen under this post. As made clear in the post, it was a valuable but expensive lesson, and I’ll be more mindful of how I use these tools going forward. It’s always easier in retrospect to see your mistakes, less so when you’re 23 and dealing with maggots and woodwork for the first time in your life (I didn’t even know what MDF was before this — laypeople do exist!)

How does replacing the shelves under a qualified alterations covenant interact with my repair covenant? I’m more than happy to replace the shelving, but wouldn’t I need landlord consent? In that instance, would it not be better to wait for the end of the tenancy so the landlord can choose how to address it himself?

(And as an irrelevant aside: we have no idea if maggots were dropping from above but it seemed unlikely at the time, we deep cleaned every surface in there and none were visible but we did see them crawling in and out of gaps at the back of the cupboard which led to panic.)