Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Eagan, we come the whole way down for the bigger jobs.

Eagan’s own comprehensive plan doesn’t dress this up either, saying much of the housing stock “was built from the late 1970’s through the early 1990’s and is now 35-45 years old” and that monitoring and maintaining that aging stock stays a priority for the city. The census puts the numbers under it, with 10,590 of Eagan’s 28,814 housing units going up between 1980 and 1989, which is 36.8 percent of everything here in one decade, and another 6,033 through the 1990s, so those twenty years account for 57.7 percent of every home in Eagan.

It happened fast, and that’s why a street here tends to be one builder and one build year the whole way down. The city’s housing chapter counts 10,603 households added in the 1980s on top of 4,217 in the 1970s, an average of about 700 new units a year between 1970 and 2000, and then it stops, with fewer than 170 a year after 2000 and about 40 a year through the 2008 to 2012 recession, and the plan gives the credit to I-35E, Highway 77 and I-494 going in and opening the place up to the rest of the metro.

The census puts the median owner occupied house in Eagan at 1987, which makes the typical one about thirty nine years old, and the city says roughly 65 percent of all homes here were built before 1990 and calls that a concern, on the grounds that thirty years is when a house starts needing the major work done. We’re not going to tell you what’s inside your ducts from up here and we’re not going to tell you they’ve never been opened, because we can’t know either of those things from a website, but we’ll tell you what we find when we open them and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

People don’t move out of them either, and the city measured that rather than guessed it, finding seventy percent of all Eagan households stayed in their existing home through 2004 to 2009 and eighty seven percent of the ones aged fifty five and over, then concluding that Eagan home owners have a longer tenure in their homes than both the metro region and Dakota County. The census says about 29 percent of owners here moved in during 1999 or earlier, 2,949 households that arrived through the 1990s and another 2,424 who were already in, and nobody in that group has had a closing or a walkthrough in more than twenty five years to put the ductwork in front of them.

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 split is 52 percent single family detached, 22 percent attached townhomes and 26 percent apartment style, and the census counts 14,311 detached houses against 4,945 attached, so a lot of what we’d clean in Eagan is a whole house at once. About a third of the occupied homes here are rented though, 9,437 of 28,046, so if you’re in one of those the call has to start with whoever owns it rather than with us.

Eagan calls itself a community known for its trees and counts nearly 1,200 lakes, wetlands and ponds inside about thirty four square miles, with more than 55 city parks, over 4,000 acres of park and recreation land and Lebanon Hills Regional Park taking up nearly 2,000 acres of that in the south, so the floors we get called out to here have a trail’s worth of grit in them, and it’s worked deeper into the hallway and the landing every time somebody or something comes back through the door.

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. Given where we’re starting from, book the rooms you’ve been putting off at the same time as the ones you meant to call about, because a single small carpet job comes up to the $129 minimum for a visit and you’d be paying that either way.

The city puts 22 percent of Eagan’s housing stock at attached townhomes and the census counts 4,945 single family attached units, and the thing worth knowing isn’t the share, it’s the timing, because the plan says townhomes, condominiums and single family homes all boomed together through the 1980s and early 1990s once the highways went in. So the townhome you’re standing in tends to be the same age as the detached house on the next street rather than newer infill dropped in later, and the run behind your dryer has had just as long to fill as anything in that house, with more bends in it and a longer way to go before it reaches outside air.

Board members and whoever looks after an association are the people we’d most like to hear from in Eagan, because a whole row of units at one address changes the arithmetic on a trip like this in a way a single vent never will, and we can settle the number for the row over the phone before anybody leaves Champlin.

There’s one limit and we’d rather have it printed here than drive the length of the metro and tell you about it in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. By the census count Eagan has 5,116 units in buildings of fifty or more, and a vent that comes out three floors up is one we’ll turn down here the same as we’d turn it down at home.

Before the highways this was farmland and the city says so itself, that Eagan Township was established in 1860 with a population of 567 and took its name from Patrick Eagan, the first Town Board Supervisor, and that between about 1840 and 1930 so many onions were grown and shipped from here that Eagan was known as the Onion Capital of the U.S. The plan adds that until 1948 there was little platted land here at all, and it didn’t become a city until 1972.

The older housing is over on the west and north central side near Cedar Avenue and Highway 13, where the first subdivisions went in: Post Additions and Country Home Heights in 1949, the McKee Additions between 1954 and 1956, and Cedar Grove, one of the first large scale residential developments in the city, twelve additions begun in 1959, with the first apartment buildings following in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If that’s your address then your house is a generation older than most of Eagan and we’d want to hear that before we quote you.

There’s one corner of the city that isn’t like anywhere else we go, because a special area inside Lebanon Hills Regional Park covers seven privately owned properties on 18.5 acres, five of them occupied by single family homes and two of them vacant lots, and the plan says every one of those houses runs on a private well and its own septic system, with four of the properties reached off Carriage Hill Drive, a private street off Pilot Knob Road. There were still 158 active private septic systems in Eagan at the end of 2017, most of them on the larger lots in the south east, which doesn’t change the cleaning at all but does change how we find you.