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The lower rung of the ladder in my kitchen broke last month and I stuck a little Post-it note on the wall to remind myself to step over the missing rung so I wouldn't break my leg every time I go up or downstairs—but then my mum came to visit and she saw me hopping over the gap in the ladder with practised ease and her face was the definition of "you live like this?" And she went to get a screwdriver to unscrew the ladder from the wall so we could carry it outside and repair it.

Some people see a broken ladder and immediately open a toolbox to fix the problem; some people see a broken ladder and stick a Post-it note to the wall to train themselves to step over the problem forever. (I admit my response is inferior.)

I think I felt daunted at the thought of tinkering with this ladder because it's been here in the same place for over a century and I pictured the whole thing crumbling into dust if we tried to move it—but no, it's still solid, except the lower rung. Which wasn't damaged by time, but by Pandolf. (And some insects. But mostly Pandolf.)

When he was a baby, for a week or so after I took him home, he was extremely upset about having to spend the night in his dog bed in the kitchen while I went upstairs to my bedroom, he would cry and cry and one night in a fit of despair and rage he attacked the ladder. The next morning I found the lower rung (the only one he could reach) looking like it had been attacked by a termite colony, but it was Pandolf's pointy little puppy teeth. By the look of it he'd spent half the night furiously gnawing on it until he dropped from exhaustion—his reasoning was clearly that if he destroyed the ladder, I wouldn't be able to go upstairs anymore and would be forced to spend the night on the floor of the kitchen with him.

It's really hard to be mad at baby Pandolf, though. Go on, try.

Eventually he got used to sleeping in his dog bed and he abandoned his ladder destruction project, but the lower rung has been fragile ever since, and it finally broke last month.

My mum is extremely efficient; she sent me to the barn to find some kind of thick board (you can find anything in the barn if you have a torch and aren't afraid of bats or century-old spiderwebs) and when I came back she had prepared all the tools and taken all the measurements.

The worst part was tapering the sides so the rung would fit in the notches, because if one side was a little bit thinner than the other then it was wobbly—

—plus I used a file at first and it took forever (Pandolf was so bored), but then I remembered I own a sanding machine and it went a lot faster. So much so that my mum said I should make a second rung while I was at it—she was motivated to replace all of them, but then it started raining and we decided the rest of the ladder is solid enough and we'll replace the rungs two at a time.

I always forget that it feels satisfying to fix things! There's this little spark of pride from then on when you look at the repaired thing because you helped make it. I tend to procrastinate because I assume it'll take ages or I'm worried I'll do it wrong, until someone who's more confident with their hands than me goes like "no come on, we just need a saw, a file, a hammer, it'll take an hour tops" and we do it and it's never as difficult as I feared. (My mum: "We gave you a toy toolbox when you were little, to smash sexist stereotypes, and you're afraid of fixing things :( ...") (I cheered her up by reminding her that my brother smashes sexist stereotypes by being also afraid of fixing things.)

But yeah I spent half an hour sanding down the sides of these two lower rungs and now I look at my ladder and remember the delightful feeling of getting the tapering just right and inserting them into their slots effortlessly like a VHS tape into a VCR. I have a whole new affection for my kitchen ladder now.