Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Blaine, we come straight east to you.

Blaine’s 2040 plan says the city “began suburban-style development in the 1960s and has had consistent growth each decade since,” so “much of its housing stock is spread somewhat evenly over several decades,” with a construction boom in the 2000s, and the census backs that up unit for unit, because there’s 26,767 homes here and 6,455 of them went up in the 2000s, 4,070 in the 2010s, 4,020 in the 1990s, 3,690 in the 1980s, 3,369 in the 1970s and 2,234 in the 1960s. That’s about 43 percent of Blaine built in 2000 or later and about 28 percent built before 1980, and both of those halves are big enough that a company with one story about your house is telling it to the wrong half of the city.

Which end of town you’re in sorts most of the rest, because the city’s history section says growth was slow until the 1940s, “when housing developments began to appear in the southern part of town,” and Blaine went from 1,694 people in 1950 to 20,640 in 1970, while the same plan puts the growth still to come in “the remaining portions of Blaine’s northeastern and northwestern areas.” The sewer plan calls the oldest sewered parts of the city “approximately 50 years old” in a document written back in 2018, which puts the 1940s and 1950s houses down south up before city sewer ever reached them, so tell us the cross street on the phone and we’ve got a fair idea what we’re walking into.

The census puts the median year built at 1996 for the city and 1995 for owner occupied homes, so the middle house in Blaine is about thirty years old, and the people in them stay put, because the median owner here moved in back in 2012 and half of them have been in the same place longer than that without a move that ever put the ductwork in front of them. We’re not going to tell you off a website that yours have never been opened, but we’ll tell you what we find when we cut in, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and load the van back up.

There’s a lot of Blaine at home during the day too, with 6,996 households that have somebody sixty five or older in them, 9,633 with somebody under eighteen, and 7,642 of the city’s 37,060 workers doing their job from inside the house. Chapter 33 of your own zoning code makes homes southeast and northeast of the Anoka County airport, and homes within 500 feet of any minor or principal arterial road anywhere in the city, meet set Sound Transmission Class values and acoustical design features, so a good number of houses in Blaine were built tight for sound on purpose.

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.

The city’s own plan says “86 percent of households own their housing in Blaine” against “the metro-wide rate of 68 percent,” and the census has it at 21,999 owner occupied out of 25,794 occupied homes, so whoever’s reading this is almost always the one who decides and the one who pays for it.

Blaine sits on sand and the city says so about itself, because the surface water plan puts most of the ground here in the Zimmerman, Lino, Isanti and Rifle soil series with everything but Rifle classed as “excessively drained,” the history section says “Blaine’s soil did not allow for easy agriculture,” and the 63 acre Blaine Preserve is kept as “the best remaining example of a vast complex of wet prairies and rich fens that existed in association with the Anoka Sand Plain.” Sand is what we watch come through a front door on shoes and paws and cleats, and 9,633 Blaine households have a kid in them, so between the National Sports Center, Bunker Hills and the beach at Sunrise Lake there’s a fair amount of it getting walked back in.

It’s truck mounted hot water extraction, so the machine stays out in the van and only the hose comes inside, and far more water comes back out of the carpet than any portable unit pulls, which is why a carpet we clean in the morning is dry by that evening in normal conditions.

64 percent of the housing in Blaine is detached houses, 20 percent is townhomes and 7.6 percent is manufactured homes, and the city puts that in context itself, that “only one percent of all homes metro-wide are mobile homes and Blaine has the largest supply of manufactured housing parks in the state.” More than a quarter of the homes in Blaine aren’t a standard detached house, and all of them get the same price sheet and the same three of us.

There’s one limit on this job and we’d rather have it printed on the page than say it to you in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

The city has been permitting about 465 housing units a year, which its own plan calls “far more units than any other community adjacent to Blaine,” and it expects the rest of that growth in “the remaining portions of Blaine’s northeastern and northwestern areas.” Blaine came in at 70,222 people on the 2020 census, says it’s the tenth largest city in Minnesota, and expects to keep going to somewhere between 85,000 and 90,000, so plenty of the newest houses up there had an entire build going on around them with the ductwork already in, and we’d rather look at one of those early than late.

East central Blaine is the other end of the same city, where the plan counted 509 properties still running their own septic as of November 30 2017 and says the North Oaks West and South Oaks neighborhoods “are planned to remain serviced by on-site sewage disposal systems indefinitely.” Those are rural residential lots inside a city of seventy thousand people, and they’re a different kind of call from a townhome off Lakes Parkway, so tell us which one you’re in rather than let us guess it off the address.