For three months I thought my husband was being stubborn about the dresser

The anchor kit for our son's dresser sat on top of that dresser, still in its packet, for three months.

I bought it. I reminded him about it. Every few days I looked at it and got a little angrier.

If you own your home, and your toddler has started climbing, and there is an anchor kit sitting somewhere in your house that nobody has mounted, I want to tell you what was actually happening in mine. I had it wrong the whole time, and I don't think I'm the only one who gets it wrong this way.

I am not going to tell you how to talk to your husband. I am going to tell you what we were really arguing about.

You bring it up after bedtime.

He says he doesn't know how to mount the kit securely. You ask why. He says he can't find a stud to screw it into. You say just drill it anyway. He says no, and you both go to sleep annoyed.

Then a few nights later you have it again.

Before I had kids I had a whole plan for this. "I'll just teach my kids not to climb on the furniture."

Then our son figured out climbing, and now he is up on something almost every time my back is turned. So I wrote a list and put it on the fridge. The shelves in the living room. The wardrobe in our bedroom. The large China cabinet in the dining room. And first, the dresser in his room.

My husband read the back of the first anchor kit and set it down.

"I don't know how to mount this securely," he said.

The screws had to go into a stud, and neither of us knew how to find one. We had bought one of those stud finders at the hardware store. It didn't show studs anywhere.

He said the thing he would keep saying for three months.

"I only want to drill into the studs."

So the whole project stalled.

For three months I kept bringing my husband solutions, and every one of them answered a question he had not asked.

The first was to drill anyway. "We own the house. Let's just put the plastic anchors in the wall. That would be better than nothing."

"It's not better than nothing if the kit pulls out of the drywall and the dresser tips over anyway," he said.

The second was to buy a different anchor kit. I found one I didn't love and bought it anyway, because buying something felt like progress. It went in the drawer next to the first one. It needed a stud too.

The third was to hire a handyman. That one offended him more than anything else I said, and at the time I could not understand why. I thought I was taking work off his plate. He heard that I didn't trust him to do a job in his own house.

Three fixes over three months, and not one of them told him where the stud was.

The worst part wasn't the anchor kit still in its packet. The worst part was that I stopped seeing a stuck job and started seeing a stubborn husband.

I was at work when my husband called. Our son had climbed his dresser.

Luckily he got out of the way in time.

I drove home certain that the dresser would be on the wall by dinner.

It wasn't.

When I walked in, my husband was on his knees in our son's room, sliding the stud finder across the same wall again.

"Nothing," he said.

"Then drill anyway," I said.

"Only into a stud," he said. "Mounted wrong, it tips over anyway."

That night I called him stubborn, out loud, and he didn't answer me.

After he went to bed I sat on the kitchen floor with my phone and posted in a parenting group on Reddit.

I wrote that my husband couldn't find the studs. I wrote, "He is being stubborn, he was offended when I suggested we hire a handyman or someone to do it." And I asked for two things: how to drill into a wall when you can't find studs, and "how to convince my stubborn husband that this is very important".

Half of my question was about drilling. The other half was about managing my husband. Neither half was about the wall.

The replies split right down the middle.

"Forget about the studs."

"Very important to anchor furniture INTO THE STUDS."

"We could hammer in those plastic hole things and then put screws into them."

"Anchoring it to the dry wall won't help."

I read the whole thread twice and it did not help me at all. Every reply was an argument about what to screw into. Not one of them told me how to find the thing my husband wanted to screw into.

Then I clicked into another thread and found a post from a mother having the same fight I was.

"My boyfriend keeps saying we can't anchor them but Im sure that's a bunch of bull."

"He just gets lazy."

I could have written that post myself.

She called her boyfriend lazy. I called my husband stubborn.

Neither of us had written one word about the wall.

That was the light bulb, and it was not a nice feeling.

I didn't have a stubborn husband. I had a husband who didn't know how to mount the kit securely, because nothing in our house could show him where the stud was. For three months I had filed the whole thing under his character. He was missing one piece of information, and he had been missing it the entire time.

Once I saw it that way, everything he had done made sense. That's why he spent whole evenings at that wall and came back with nothing. That's why he went quiet every time I said the word handyman. He wanted the furniture anchored as much as I did. He knew a kit mounted wrong could still let the dresser tip over, and he was not going to mount it wrong.

It also explains why my three answers went nowhere. A handyman would have taken the question out of the house and taken it with him when he left, and the wardrobe and the shelves and the China cabinet were all still on the fridge. The plastic anchors changed the subject. Forgetting about the studs asked him to stop caring about the one part he cared most about.

And when nobody answers the question, nothing dramatic happens. That is the whole problem. The kit doesn't get mounted next week either, and at some point you start to think the packet on the dresser says something about your marriage.

So I stopped looking for ways to convince him and started looking for a way to find the stud.

And I finally understood what we had been doing wrong with the one in the drawer.

We had been asking it a yes or no question. Is there a stud here, or isn't there.

He never needed yes or no. He needed to know where the stud starts and where it stops, so the screw goes in the middle of it.

That is a different question, and once I had it I knew what I was shopping for. I needed a reading. Something that could sit flat against that wall and give him a mark to drill into instead of a guess.

What I found was the Wallux wall scanner.

It shows the stud's center and both edges on the screen, so you can see where the stud starts and where it stops instead of guessing at the middle. There is a small hole in the middle for marking the center with a pencil. You hold it flat against the wall and read it before you drill. It isn't something you put on the drill.

It calibrates itself, and the chip in it is designed to reduce false readings.

It doesn't do the job for you. It answers the question my husband had been asking that wall for three months.

I sent him the link and wrote, "You were right. This shows you where the stud is."

He texted back, "Order it."

Our walls are painted drywall. That evening he held the scanner flat against the wall in our son's room and slid it across slowly.

"There," he said.

He marked the center through the little hole. Then he drilled into the stud, the way he had wanted to from the start.

Nothing dramatic happened, and that's the part I'd want to know if I were the one reading this. A man found a stud in his own house and put a screw into it.

The dresser is now bolted to the wall.

The next weekend was the wardrobe in our bedroom. Scan, check both edges, mark the center, drill into the stud. The shelves went the weekend after that. The China cabinet went last, because it was the one I was most nervous about.

About a month after the dresser, the last kit was out of the drawer and every piece on my list was mounted the way he wanted it mounted.

The list came off the fridge. I hadn't realized how much room it had been taking up in my head until it wasn't there.

It did not turn my husband into a different person, and it did not end every argument in our house. It answered one question. That question happened to be the one holding up the entire list.

So did we. I'm not going to tell you yours is broken, because I don't know what's behind your paint.

What I can tell you is what was different for us. A reading that showed the center and both edges, so my husband could see where the stud started and where it stopped, and a hole in the middle to mark it through. It auto-calibrates, with a chip designed to reduce false readings. Whether that reads differently on your wall is something you'd find out on your wall, which is what the 30-day money-back guarantee is for.

That was my position for three months, so I'm the last person who gets to argue with you about it.

I'm also not the one to tell you what holds and what doesn't, and neither is a wall scanner. What keeps a dresser against the wall is the anchor kit, its rating, and how it's installed. One reply in my thread said "I didn't even feel confident in those plastic anchors holding it to our wall." Another said the opposite: "I feel pretty confident in the anchors".

In my house it turned out not to matter who was right, because my husband had already decided. He only wanted to drill into studs. Which meant the only road to the job getting done ran through finding one.

I offered, and I understand now why it landed the way it did.

Somebody in one of those threads had the same plan: "I'm currently trying to find a handyman who will anchor my furniture because I'm scared I'll do it wrong." It's a real option. It just doesn't leave anything behind in the house. He comes, the dresser goes on the wall, and the question walks back out the door with him.

Ours are painted drywall, and that's what it's for. It works on drywall and on painted walls like ours. On wood studs it reads up to 0.75 inches in exact mode and up to 1.5 inches in deep mode.

It does not work on plaster, lath, brick or concrete.

So if that's what's behind your paint, this is not your answer, and I would rather say that now than have you find out on a Friday evening with the packet already open.

It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

If you skip this, the anchor kit stays in its packet.

He keeps saying he doesn't know how to mount the kit securely. You keep saying drill anyway. The same conversation happens again next week, and then you stop bringing it up, and it is still sitting there.

Three months from now the list is still on the fridge and you are still carrying it.

Your husband doesn't need convincing.

He needs a way to find the stud.

It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can find out on your own wall whether that was the thing your house was missing.