Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Dayton, we’re the city on your east line.

There are 3,327 housing units in Dayton, 938 of them built in 2020 or later and another 797 between 2010 and 2019, so 52.2 percent of the housing in this city has gone up since 2010 while only 119 units date from the whole of the 2000s. The census puts the median Dayton home at 2011, and what we’re pulling out of a house that new is usually the build itself, drywall dust and sawdust and bits of insulation that went down the openings while the trades were still working in there.

Underneath that sits an older Dayton the median doesn’t show you. 552 homes here are from the 1970s, which is the biggest decade the city had before 2000, with 444 from the 1990s, 174 from the 1980s and 215 built before 1960. The city’s plan says in one line that “No pre-1970 services exist” and that “The first city collection system was constructed in 2000”, so every one of those older houses was put up with its own well and its own septic, and that isn’t a subdivision mechanical room and we don’t walk in treating it like one.

983 owner households in Dayton moved into their house in 2020 or later while another 465 have been in the same one since 1999 or earlier, so we get two very different phone calls out of the same city. Nobody can tell you off a website whether yours have ever been opened and we’re not going to guess at it from here, but we’ll tell you what’s in there once we’ve got a panel off, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

There’s a lot of people home in these houses through the day, with 22.8 percent of Dayton’s workers working from home, 37 percent of households having a child under eighteen in them and 21.5 percent having someone sixty five or older, and the average household here runs 2.8 people against 2.52 across the region.

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 land use table gives 5,767 acres to agriculture and farm, which is 35.93 percent of Dayton and the single largest use of land in it, with another 2,679 acres of rural residential out of 16,052 total, and the Met Council files the city as an “Emerging Suburban Edge” community while the plan itself says “Dayton remains a largely rural area”. A good share of what ends up on your carpet started out as field, gravel or river sand, and it’s coming in on the same three feet of floor inside every door.

There’s about 3,800 acres of public park land and open space here, roughly 18 miles of city trails, eight lakes and a large part of Elm Creek Park Reserve that the plan says stays open ground for good. Add the 37 percent of households with a kid in them and most of what we’re actually cleaning is the strip of hallway everyone walks on, the top few steps and the square of floor inside the door where the boots come off.

93 percent of the occupied homes in Dayton are owner occupied, 3,047 against 230 rented, so whoever’s reading this owns the carpet and pays for the cleaning about nine times out of ten. The machine is truck mounted and stays out in the van, which is how hot water extraction pulls far more water back out of the carpet than any portable unit does, and a morning clean is dry by that evening in normal conditions, with pet treatment at $25 a room on top of that if you want it.

2,800 of the 3,327 homes in Dayton are single family detached and only 70 of them are attached, so almost every house in this city has its own furnace, its own duct system and its own vent going out through its own wall, and that’s what we’re quoting on when you call.

310 Dayton homes, about 9 percent of the housing, are manufactured, and the city’s only operating manufactured home park sits in southwest Dayton. Those runs are short, they sit low and they turn hard under the floor, so we don’t come at them the way we would a rambler, and it’s the same visit and the same equipment either way.

There’s one limit on this and it belongs on the page rather than in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

The oldest part of the city is the Historic Village in northwest Dayton, settled in the 1850s and still holding St. John the Baptist Church from 1904, and the city has it down as a redevelopment area waiting on sewer and water. The census counts 72 housing units in Dayton that were standing in 1939 or earlier and 143 more from the 1950s, and a house out of either of those is the kind where we take a panel off and find a system that’s been changed over more than once.

The rest of it’s arriving from the other corners. The plan says the city is developing “from three corners with, northeast and south being most active”, counts twelve new single family subdivisions at various stages, and the Dayton Parkway interchange on I-94 opened for traffic in November 2021. The city pulled more than 230 single family permits in the first ten months of 2019 alone and the Met Council has Dayton at 10,400 residents and 4,400 households by 2040 against 1,619 households in 2010, so a fair few of the houses we’ll be cleaning in ten years aren’t built yet.