Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Apple Valley, both downtowns are between us and you.

There’s no single build year to guess at in Apple Valley, because the census counts 22,013 housing units here and spreads them almost evenly across three decades, 4,429 from the 1970s, 4,562 from the 1980s and 5,035 from the 1990s, which is about a fifth of the city each time. Only 1,553 units date from the 1960s and 620 are older than that, so we’re not opening octopus furnaces or gravity systems down here, it’s sheet metal trunk and branch behind the drywall, and 73.6 percent of everything standing in this city was up before 2000.

The city says much the same about itself, that “Approximately 50% of the housing stock consists of units that were constructed between 1960 and 1990” and that “As they continue to age, reinvestment is needed to address repairs,” and from Dakota County tax records that “52% of all housing units (through 2016) were built prior to 1987” and are primarily single family. The census puts the median owner occupied house at 1987 as well, which makes the typical one about thirty nine years old, and in thirty nine years a furnace gets changed once or twice while the ductwork it’s bolted to stays where the builder left it.

What makes this city a different job from the rest of the south metro is the shape of the houses, because the plan says “Nearly 40% of homes are ’split level’ style” and puts houses of two or more stories at only about a third of the units. A split level doesn’t run its ductwork the way a two story does, since the trunk has to climb through half levels to get anywhere, the returns tend to sit low in the house and the branches come out short with more turns in them, so getting a brush through the whole system takes longer than the square footage says it should.

People stay put here too, and 4,410 of Apple Valley’s owner households, 27.8 percent of them, moved in during 1999 or earlier, with 2,050 of those already in the house before 1990, so better than a quarter of the owners in this city haven’t had a closing or a walkthrough in twenty seven years to put the ductwork in front of them. We can’t tell you from up in Champlin whether anybody’s ever had a brush down yours and we’re not going to guess at it, but you’ll get a straight answer once we’ve got a panel off, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

It’s the same three things at every house, powerful vacuum, compressed air and rotary brush, and all three of them go in every time. We sometimes cut more than two access points in the trunk lines. We never charge for more than two.

15,880 of the 21,627 occupied homes in Apple Valley are owner occupied, which is 73.4 percent, so most of the people who call us own the carpet they’re calling about, but that’s lower than a lot of the suburbs we work in and better than one household in four here rents, so if that’s you then the call starts with whoever owns the place rather than with us.

The city runs “an extensive park system with over 900 acres of parkland, 75 miles of trails” and puts 53 playgrounds, 40 ball diamonds and 24 multi purpose fields inside it, with the Minnesota Zoo in the city and Lebanon Hills on the edge of it, so a season of grass, sand and infield dirt comes back through the front door on two feet or four. In a split level it doesn’t get far before it hits a landing, which is why the stairs and the half flight up out of the entry wear through long before the bedrooms do.

The machine never gets carried through your door, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction and it lives in the van, which is why it takes far more water back out of the carpet than a portable one ever gets near, and a morning clean is dry by that evening in normal conditions, with pet treatment at $25 a room on top if you want it. We’re only down here the once, so whatever you want doing is better on the one visit than spread over two, and small carpet jobs come up to the $129 minimum for a visit anyway.

6,061 of the housing units in Apple Valley are single family attached, the twins and the townhomes, against 11,119 detached houses, so better than one home in four here shares a wall with somebody. It’s been going that way for thirty years and the city has the numbers on it, with single family detached falling from 68 percent of the stock in 1990 to 61 percent in 2000 and 52 percent in 2015 while townhomes and structures of ten or more units accounted for 94 percent of all the growth. The laundry in a twin or a townhome tends to sit away from an outside wall, so the run has to travel to reach one and it picks up bends on the way, and lint settles at every bend instead of going out with the air, and a whole row of them booked on the one afternoon is what makes a trip down here worth loading the van for, so if you look after an association that’s the call we want.

There are two manufactured home parks here as well, both on the Cedar Avenue corridor on the north side of the city, one either side of Highway 77, and the census counts 400 mobile homes in them across the 108 acres the city’s own table gives them. Those don’t behave like a stick built house, with short tight ductwork running under the floor and a dryer vent that comes straight out at ground level, which is the only kind we do anyway.

There’s one limit on the vents and we’d rather you read it here than hear it from us on your front step after we’ve come all that way. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. That takes in the 2,339 units the census puts in buildings of fifty or more, and it’s a straight limit rather than something anyone talks us into.

This was Lebanon Township until the residents voted at the 1968 general election to incorporate as the Village of Apple Valley, with a mayor and four councilmembers taking office on the first of January 1969 and the place becoming a statutory city on the first of January 1974. The area had 585 residents in 1960, the first residential neighborhoods went in during the spring of 1955, and then Orrin Thompson started building here in 1963 and, in the city’s own words, “selected the name Apple Valley for several of his plats on either side of County Road 42 that were located in the southwest corner of the city,” having an apple tree planted at each home in some of the new developments. The households came in behind him fast, 2,031 in 1970, 6,376 in 1980, 11,145 in 1990 and 16,344 by 2000, and the oldest tract housing in this city is still down in that southwest corner along County Road 42.

It isn’t finished either, whatever anybody tells you, because roughly 487 of the city’s 11,181 acres are still to be developed and the old Fischer sand and aggregate mine in south central Apple Valley runs to more than 400 acres on its own, being reclaimed as a mixed business campus the city calls Orchard Place, with that designation covering 262 acres of it. Cobblestone Lake in the south east is a whole neighborhood the city describes as completed in the last decade, and the Central Village is another sixty acres around the corner of Galaxie Avenue and 153rd Street West, so if yours is one of the newer ones then an entire build happened around that ductwork with drywall dust and sawdust going down open registers for months before anybody handed you the keys, and that’s a first year phone call rather than a tenth year one.