Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Deephaven, we drive out for houses this old.

The census counts 1,599 housing units in Deephaven and puts 41.7 percent of them up before 1960 and 62.9 percent before 1980, with the median owner occupied home at 1965 and the median across all units at 1969. The city’s own 2040 plan lands in the same place off older numbers when it says “In total, 48.2% of the city’s housing stock was built before 1960,” and two counts a decade apart agreeing on the shape of a town is about as good as this kind of thing gets, so when we say the ductwork out here is older than what we open in the newer suburbs we aren’t guessing at it.

The plan’s own line for what is standing is that “Housing types vary from converted summer homes, to new subdivisions and large estates”, and you can see where the first of those came from in the neighborhood names, because in Deephaven Park and Cottagewood “many of the original lots were platted at 7,500 - 10,000 square feet” and the city says it gets frequent variance requests over lot widths and setbacks. Small lots with houses extended out to the edge of what those lots allow tends to mean ductwork that went in a piece at a time as rooms got added, which is a slower job than a trunk and branch somebody drew before the walls went up, and it’s the kind we’d rather have.

388 of Deephaven’s 1,343 owner households moved into their house before 2000 and 167 of them have been there since 1989 or earlier, while the median owner in town moved in around 2011, so one street can hand us somebody who’s been living with the same system since the eighties and somebody who bought the place a few years back and wants to know what they bought. We won’t guess at the state of yours from a website, and a place that began as a summer cottage and got winterized a room at a time gives us less to read off the curb than a subdivision build does, so the answer comes once a cover is off a trunk line, and a system that turns out clean gets called clean and we pack the van back up.

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.

Deephaven has no municipal water. The city’s plan says water “is provided from private wells with the exception of four localized areas”, naming Minnetonka serving the Jericho Road area, some Chowen’s Corner businesses and the Deephaven Education Center, and Shorewood serving Amesbury North, and the surface water plan repeats that “private wells are the primary source of drinking water throughout Deephaven.” The city also writes down what tends to be in it, that the quality “is generally acceptable except that it has a high iron content and, in some cases, a high arsenic content,” which is the city’s finding about the supply rather than a verdict on anybody’s floor, but it’s why we ask what a house is plumbed to before we start talking about a mark that’s been there a while.

1,343 of the 1,504 occupied homes here are owner occupied, so the person reading this is nearly always the person who decides and pays for it. Past that it’s a town with three DNR classified lakes inside its own boundary, Lake Minnetonka plus Shavers Lake and Lake Marion, woodlands that the plan says “cover a majority of the total land in the community,” and most of its streets with no curb on them, so what walks back through the door out here is beach sand, lake water and leaf litter more than it is the salt and road grit we scrub out of a subdivision hallway in February.

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 any portable unit pulls, and if we clean in the morning it’s dry by the evening in normal conditions.

1,420 of Deephaven’s 1,599 housing units are detached houses and 11 are attached, and the one multi family building the city names in its own plan is Deephaven Woods Senior Living, 78 rental units put up in 2014. Near enough every dryer in this town vents out through a wall the house owns by itself, so the run is whatever that house has needed it to be over the years, short and straight in something built this century and anybody’s guess in a place that’s had rooms put on it since the fifties, and the useful thing you can do before we come out is step outside and find where it comes out.

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. A hood a few feet up the side of a house is no trouble, and a newer build with the laundry on the second floor can put one well past what we’ll reach, so tell us which of those you’ve got when you call.

The plan says the older housing “is gradually being replaced by new housing, particularly on lakeshore lots, but also within the neighborhood interiors”, and on the lakeshore that “smaller homes were acquired and demolished to allow the construction of larger homes.” The census backs that up, with 395 units, 24.7 percent of the city, dating from 2000 or later, which is more than the 1980s and the 1990s put together at 198, so one street can carry a sixty year old cottage and a house built in the last few years and we don’t know which of them we’re standing in until a cover comes off a trunk line.

None of it has stopped either, because the city’s 2024 planning and development report counts 46 new houses over four years, an average of 11.5 a year, with seven of them in 2024 and twelve additions and detached garages on top of that, and the city issued 490 building, mechanical and plumbing permits that same year in a town of about 1,600 homes. That’s a steady amount of construction going on in and around houses people are living in, which is why post build cleanup is a real part of what we do rather than an afterthought, so if you’ve just had work done it’s worth a call before the furniture goes back.