Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Big Lake, we come out past the farmland.

The census counts 4,162 homes in Big Lake and puts 1,470 of them in the 2000s and another 1,062 in the 1990s, so six in ten houses here went up inside those twenty years, and it puts the median owner occupied house at 2001, which makes the typical one about twenty five years old. The town grew into that in a hurry, from 1,215 people in 1970 to 3,113 in 1990, 6,063 in 2000 and 10,060 by 2010, so a lot of this ductwork went into the walls in the same handful of building seasons and it’s all about the same age now.

The thing people assume about a Sherburne County address is wells and septic, and inside the city limits that’s backwards, because the plan counts 60 miles of gravity sewer pipe, another 7.5 miles of force main and fourteen lift stations, says nearly every building in the city is served, and puts what’s left at 40 to 50 on site systems, most of them north of the school campus. The wells and the tanks belong to Big Lake Township, which wraps the whole way around the city and holds about three quarters as many people, living almost entirely in detached houses on large lots with their own wells and their own wastewater systems, and both of those addresses say Big Lake on the envelope. Either one’s the same job at the same price to us, and the only reason to mention it on the phone is so we know which of the two we’re coming to.

86.9 percent of the occupied homes here are owner occupied, 3,507 out of 4,036, so the person reading this is usually the person who decides, and most of them haven’t been in the house long: 1,477 of those owner households moved in between 2010 and 2019, another 820 arrived in 2020 or later, and only 353, about one in ten, have been in the same house since 1999 or earlier. That means a lot of people in this town are living in a twenty five year old house with no idea what the family before them ran through it, and the year or two after you move in is the sensible point to have it opened up rather than the tenth year. We can’t tell you from a website whether anything’s ever been up your trunk line and we won’t pretend otherwise, but we’ll have the covers off and show you what’s in there, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and go.

This city empties out during the day more than anywhere else we work. The plan’s economic chapter says 92.8 percent of working residents leave the community for their job, 5,350 of them heading out each morning against 414 who live and work here, and it puts 47.4 percent of those commutes at more than twenty five miles, while the census finds only 9.6 percent working from home, 689 people out of 7,147. So tell us on the phone who’s actually going to be in the house and we’ll sort a time out with you rather than hand you a window and hope. Worth saying too that 838 homes here heat with electricity against 3,088 on gas, and an electric furnace or an air handler pushes air through the same ductwork and gets the same brush and the same vacuum as anything else.

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.

86.3 percent of the housing here is detached single family, 3,592 houses out of 4,162, so what we’re usually cleaning is a whole house with a stair set and a hallway everybody uses. The households in them are big and young, with 45.1 percent having somebody under eighteen at home and only 13.8 percent having anyone sixty five or over, which is the lowest share of any city we work in, and owner occupied households averaging 3.14 people.

The plan says most of the soils in and around Big Lake are very sandy, and that’s the part of this city that turns up in the carpet, because sand doesn’t sit on the surface the way lint does, it works down into the base of the pile where a household vacuum can’t reach it and it grinds at the fiber from underneath every time somebody crosses the room. There are twelve lakes inside the city limits recognized by the DNR, Big, Mitchell and Keller among them and then Beaudry, Beulah, Landia, Preusse, Thompson, Kerber and McDowell, with shoreland zoning running a thousand feet back from the water, so between the yards, the driveways and the lake accesses there’s sand coming through the door on two feet and on four. Pet treatment is $25 a room on top of the room price, and we’d rather say that on the phone than leave you to find it on the invoice.

The machine never comes in the house, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction and it stays out in the van, which is how far more water comes back out of the carpet than any portable unit pulls, and a morning clean is dry by the evening in normal conditions. Down near the water it can take a bit longer, and the city says why in its own utilities chapter, that there’s no flooding in the neighborhoods around Big Lake and Lake Mitchell but basements may be wet if the sump pump isn’t running, so a lower level down there starts off damper than one up by the school does.

Most of what gets written about dryer vents is really written about townhomes, and it doesn’t apply here, because the census counts 156 attached units in Big Lake against 3,592 detached houses, so 3.7 percent of this city has a shared wall to run a duct along. What you’ve almost certainly got is your own house, your own vent and a run that goes out through a wall near the floor, which is the straightforward version of this job and the one that sits inside our limit, and with the size of the households out here that vent’s doing plenty of work.

There’s one limit and we’d rather print it here than have you find out on the day. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

People came out to Big Lake before they lived in it, and the city tells that story itself, that in the early 1900s Mr. Brown’s son George subdivided his land on the shore and sold it for vacation cabins, other landowners followed him, and groups and families would travel out by train or by car for a day or more of picnicking, swimming, baseball, dancing in the pavilion or vacationing on the shore. The town was incorporated in 1898 and had 177 people in it by 1900, and those lots haven’t gone anywhere, which is why the land use plan carries a Lakeshore Cottage Neighborhood category over the shoreland around Big, Mitchell and Keller Lakes and describes it as very small lots dating from the 1890s to the 1950s, zoned R-5 to encourage the small parcels to be consolidated and to keep new buildings set back off the existing houses. The census puts 276 homes in the city built before 1960 and 40 of them before 1940.

They aren’t cabins any more, because the plan says the early lake cabins are now mostly remodeled or replaced, and what that leaves is a year round house on ground platted before anybody was thinking about where a furnace would go, with heating and venting added to the building rather than designed into it. That’s a different job from a 2001 subdivision house, so if you’re on one of those lots then call us and tell us what’s under there and we’ll work it out with you before anybody’s van is moving. The plan calls that end of town a distinct and interesting portion of the community that links it to its nineteenth century roots, and that’s about how it looks from a driveway too.