Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Coon Rapids, we’re the town across the water.

The census counts 25,346 homes in Coon Rapids and puts the median one at 1983, and at 1982 for owner occupied houses on their own, which makes the typical one about 44 years old. It got there in two goes rather than one long build, with 2,601 homes in the 1950s and 3,890 in the 1960s, a quieter 3,665 through the 1970s, then 6,549 in the 1980s and 4,724 in the 1990s, and then a hard stop, because only about 12 percent of the city has gone up since 2000. Nearly 29 percent of every home here was standing before 1970, and the city’s own sewer plan lands on the same share off its parcel records, 5,776 buildings out of 20,120, and that’s two counts with nothing to do with each other landing on the same number.

Your plan puts those two waves on the map for us as well. It says older housing built in the 1950s and 1960s “cover large swaths of the central part of the city” while “Newer properties have mostly been built in the northern part of the city and through redevelopment near the Mississippi River,” so the middle of town and the north end of town are two different afternoons of work and we’d rather treat them that way than turn up with one plan for a city this old.

The pipes and the wells date the whole thing. Coon Rapids drilled its first four municipal water wells in 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961, and roughly 70 miles of vitrified clay sanitary sewer main went into the ground here “up to the mid-1970s” and has since been lined between 2008 and 2017, with the city saying the gravity system “is in good condition.” There’s no well and septic pocket left to speak of either, because the Metropolitan Council forecast tables in your plan carry an unsewered line of just 32 households against 29,300, so every house we come to in this city is a city services house.

People here stay, which is the part that matters to us. Of the 18,601 owner occupied homes in Coon Rapids, 2,630 households moved in during the 1990s and another 2,866 were already in before that, so 5,496 owners, nearly a third of every homeowner in the city, have been in the same house since 1999 or earlier and 15.4 percent since 1989 or earlier. 31.1 percent of households here have somebody sixty five or over living in them, so there’s somebody home in a lot of these houses most of the day. We can’t tell you off a website whether anybody’s ever had a brush down your trunk line and we’re not going to try, but we’ll show you what’s in there once the covers are off, and if it doesn’t need doing you’ll hear that from us standing in your basement instead of a quote.

The other thing this city does is remodel rather than move, and the plan is proud of it, with residential rehabilitation permits running toward five million dollars a year and a Metropolitan Council Housing Performance Score of 98 out of 100 in 2016 for preserving and rehabbing what’s already standing. Dust from a remodel goes everywhere the air goes, so the call worth making is the one after the contractor’s cleaned up rather than the one the following winter. 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.

About a quarter of the doors on a Coon Rapids street belong to somebody who doesn’t live behind them, because ownership here runs at 74.8 percent and the city watched it slip, writing that the owner occupied share “decreased from 80% to 74% in the 2000s even though the share of single-family homes stayed the same,” and putting that down in part to single family houses converting from owned to rented. They’re houses either way, 15,707 detached and 4,336 attached out of 25,346 units, so what we’re walking into doesn’t change much, and we’re not keeping two price sheets, so a landlord and a homeowner get quoted off the same one.

Your city writes down where the water gets in, which saves us guessing. The surface water plan records that “Wet basements have been noted adjacent to the wetland located north of Xeon Boulevard and west of Xeon Street due to high groundwater,” which it says is mostly down to sump pumps on private property not working, and that “Ponding in backyard areas of the Bridgewater neighborhood, near 116th Avenue and Cottonwood Street, occurs during heavy rainfall events.” If you’re in either of those spots the carpet that gets tested is the one downstairs, and that’s a call we’d rather take early than in August.

Upstairs it’s a wear job more than a spill job, because nearly a third of Coon Rapids owners haven’t moved since 1999 and carpet that’s had the same route walked over it for twenty five years and more wears in a line rather than all over. There’s plenty putting the traffic on it, because 30 percent of households here have somebody under eighteen in them and the plan’s own park inventory runs to better than two dozen city parks before you add Bunker Hills, the park at the dam, and the city’s own two creeks, Coon Creek and Sand Creek. It’s truck mounted hot water extraction, so the machine stays out in the van and far more water comes back out of the carpet than a portable unit pulls, and a carpet we clean in the morning is dry by that evening in normal conditions.

The city’s own table is the whole argument here. Coon Rapids counted 434 single family attached homes in the 1980 census, 4 percent of everything it had, then 2,268 by 1990, 3,739 by 2000 and 4,367 by 2015, while detached houses fell from 81 percent of the stock to 64 percent, and the census now puts attached homes at 4,336. That’s roughly one home in six, and almost none of it stood before the second wave, so the attached housing in this city is 1980s and newer, and your own surface water plan is thick with the names, Bridgewater Village and Tralee Terrace and Water’s Edge Townhomes and Weston Woods of Bunker Hills. A run through a shared wall is a long one and a long one gives lint somewhere to settle well before it ever gets outside, so if the association handles the outside of your building it’s worth knowing that before you call, because it changes who’s booking the job.

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.

It’s all in the city’s own history. Anoka Township organized on 30 July 1857, Dr. D.C. Dunham opened the Anoka Pressed Brick and Terra Cotta Company in 1881 and left behind the pit people still call the Clay Hole, and then construction started on the hydro-electric dam in 1912 and pushed the local population past a thousand, after which the township renamed itself Coon Creek Rapids and later shortened it. Voters approved village status in October 1952 and in June 1959 the village became the City of Coon Rapids, so the name’s outlived the rapids it came from by better than a century.

The dam produced electricity until 1966 and became regional park property in 1969, and it was rebuilt over two years starting in 2013, with the DNR running it as a fish barrier under a joint powers agreement while Three Rivers Park District still owns it. The houses came with the people and the people came fast, because Coon Rapids went from 14,931 in 1960 to 30,505 in 1970 and 52,978 by 1990, and that curve’s the same shape as the housing table further up this page.