Something I've always found annoying about the fixing of certain kinds of problem – particularly those around the house – is that it's very hard to take pleasure in having done it, because my brain quickly forgets the problem was ever there.

For instance, many years ago I lived in a house where the door handle kept falling off one of the kitchen cupboards. Every time I tried to use the cupboard, the handle would come off in my hand, and in order to get the cupboard open I'd have to reinsert it and then twist it at an angle so that the loose screw would apply friction to the inside of the screw hole. Eventually I lost my patience and filled the screw hole with superglue, and then it was fine.

In my ideal world, I would have liked this action to be followed by an active sense of satisfaction at a job well done every time I used the cupboard and didn't have to fiddle with the door handle. This ongoing sense of satisfaction ought properly, it seems to me, to have lasted for a length of time commensurate with the length of time for which I'd had to put up with the problem.

But in fact, in only a day or so I had almost completely forgotten the problem had ever existed. I think this is because I'd always been bad at remembering about it anyway: it was rare that I'd go to that cupboard and remember to twist the handle at the angle that made it not fall off, and more usually I'd pull the handle in the normal way, swear, put it back on and then try again more carefully. So I very quickly reached the point where I'd reflexively yank the door open as if its handle had always worked fine, and not think twice about it. So that sense of satisfaction at having fixed the problem was completely gone.

(None of my housemates commented on the door handle having started working either, which I guessed was for the same reason.)

Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth fixing the problem. It had previously irritated me every time, and afterwards it didn't. Clearly that bit of work with superglue did improve my life. But it didn't feel as if it had made my life better, since to know your life is better you have to remember that it was previously worse.

There's a whole class of household (and other) irritations that have this same property for me: as long as they're unfixed, they annoy me, but as soon as they're fixed I forget about them too quickly to derive any real satisfaction. It's as if such problems find one last way, with their metaphorical dying breath, to annoy me again.

Having just ranted about problems that I forget about as soon as they're fixed, I thought I'd balance things out by mentioning a problem which has surprised me by not having this property.

In 2000 I moved out of a shared house to live on my own in a first-floor maisonette flat, i.e. the upstairs half of a semi-detached house. In 2003 I moved from that flat into another (nicer) first-floor maisonette flat. So by late 2007, when I bought a proper house, I had been living exclusively on the first floor (apart from tiny entrance halls on the ground floor) for just over seven years.

I was a bit nervous about that, to begin with. I had an irrational worry that I might have – in some unspecified sense – forgotten how to deal with having a ground floor. Perhaps I'd accidentally leave windows open and get burgled. Or perhaps I'd have forgotten how to stop Jehovah's Witnesses from getting a foot in the door (which is very easy in a first-floor flat – you just shout down at them from the window above the front door, and never open the door at all). Or perhaps I just wouldn't feel right without those eight feet of vertical distance separating me from the ground: an Englishman's home is his castle, after all, and castles are more convincingly defensible when situated high up.

But my worries were unfounded. Pretty much as soon as I moved in, it was immediately clear that I had in fact missed having a ground floor – I just hadn't realised it before I got one back. I felt a great sense of rightness at being able to walk around downstairs and not hear the creaking of dodgy floorboards beneath my feet. (And even walking around upstairs, where the floorboards still do creak, became more pleasant once I knew the noise wasn't disturbing a downstairs neighbour.) It's important to me to have a properly solid floor at the bottom of my home, it turns out; and although I had apparently been suppressing that need so well that I hadn't realised I had it, it was there, and suddenly it was fulfilled.

I was fairly sure, back in 2007, that this would turn out to be one of those ex-problems quickly forgotten about: that the delight of not having creaky floorboards under me was a passing thing, and that after a week or so of feeling relieved I would thereafter just feel neutral about it.

But no. Rather to my surprise, I didn't get over it that quickly, and in fact after over a year and a half living here I still haven't. Every day or two I still get up from the sofa, take a few steps, and feel real pleasure at the fact that I'm walking on a real solid surface, there's no give in it beyond the carpet pile, and the only sound I'm making is the whisper of socks on carpet. Quite often I find myself gratuitously pacing back and forth just so I can enjoy it for longer.

(Good job, too: given how much money I spent on acquiring a ground floor, it would seem particularly irritating if I'd forgotten about it immediately!)

As I said in my previous post, it feels to me as if ideally one ought to be able to derive enjoyment from the absence of an irritation for about as long as the irritation persisted to begin with. By that measure, I hope not to get over this one before 2014. I wonder if I will.