Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Edina, we come the whole length of the county.

Edina’s own parcel records count 9,998 of the city’s 12,538 single family detached houses as built before 1970, which is 80 percent of them, and across every kind of housing it’s 12,549 units out of 22,835. The housing chapter says the same thing in plain words, that “over half of the housing stock (55%) was built in the 1960s and earlier,” and the sentence sitting right next to it is the one we’d have put there ourselves, that “the vast majority of housing in the city is of average or better condition, and many properties have been substantially upgraded over the years.”

The census sharpens that for whoever’s actually going to book us, because the median year built for owner occupied homes in Edina is 1966 against 1979 for rentals, and 12,376 of the 16,586 owner occupied houses here were standing before 1980. Edina’s sanitary sewer was mostly put in during the 1940s and 50s with some of the west half following in the 60s and 70s, so this city had its services in the ground while half the towns we work in every week were still fields, and the argument we’d make in a newer suburb about thirty year old sheet metal has nothing to do with your house.

The city’s also written down where the oldest work sits, because the plan says “most of the oldest neighborhoods are in the northeast quadrant of the city” while “areas in the west and south tend to be newer, post-1970,” and it’s the northeast corner against Minneapolis and St. Louis Park that holds the tracts with the highest share of older homes in them. It describes its own growth as concentric circles out from that corner until the 1980s, so age in Edina tracks how close you are to Minneapolis rather than which subdivision you turned into.

Then there’s how long people stay, with 4,485 Edina owner households having moved in during 1999 or earlier and 7,855 of them in by 2009, and the plan puts almost 20 percent of the owners in one of the city’s oldest tracts in the same house since 1979. We can’t tell you from a website that yours have never been opened and we’re not going to, but a house from the 1960s whose owner has been in it since the 1980s is the one we most want to get a look inside, and if we open it up and it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

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 census counts 12,987 of Edina’s 24,071 housing units as single family detached and 6,506 in buildings of fifty units or more, which the city says are concentrated “in a few higher density locations, such as the Greater Southdale area,” with another 1,243 attached. That’s a lower share of detached houses and a much higher share of apartment than most of the places we work, so we get both kinds of call out of Edina and the two jobs don’t look much alike.

26.9 percent of Edina households have somebody under eighteen in them, 29.2 percent of the city’s workers work from home and 37.3 percent of households include somebody sixty five or over, so between the kids, the desks and the people who are home all day, these floors get more hours on them than most. Just over 72 percent of the occupied homes here are owner occupied so the person reading this is usually the person who decides, and we’ll clean a rental the same way regardless.

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. In houses this old and this well kept we’re as careful about the trim and the thresholds we’re running a hose past as we are about the carpet.

More than a quarter of Edina’s housing, 6,506 units, sits in buildings of fifty units or more, and our dryer vent work doesn’t go up. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. We’d rather have that printed here than take the booking, drive down and tell you about it standing in your lobby.

For the 12,987 detached houses it’s an ordinary job and we do it while we’re already there for the ducts more often than not, and the thing worth telling us on the phone is where the vent comes out and about how far it runs, because that’s what decides how long we’re there rather than what it costs.

Anybody who tells you Edina stopped building hasn’t read its plan, because the city puts single family construction at “averaging around 100 per year over the past 6 years” and adds that “this does not represent a significant net number of new units, since typically these new units are replacing teardowns,” while 2,573 units went up between 2010 and 2019 and another 412 in 2020 or later. If you’re the one moving into the new one, the ductwork had an entire build go on around it before you ever got the keys, and that’s a call worth making before the boxes come off the truck.

We’d say the other half of that out loud as well, which is that the plan records residents raising “so-called ’teardowns’” over and over in the city’s own visioning work, and we’re not the people who’ll tell you a sixty year old Edina house is a candidate for one, because the houses we like being in most are the ones somebody has kept.