Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Excelsior, a house out here gets the whole day.

The census puts the median owner occupied house in Excelsior at 1953, and the same table on the same release puts Maple Grove at 1989, so the middle house that somebody owns in this town is over seventy years old. The city puts it plainer in its own sanitary sewer plan, which says “Approximately 88 percent of the residential housing in the City was constructed before 1970,” and that’s the city counting residential properties rather than dwelling units, since the census counts of units put pre 1970 closer to half, but the two of them are describing the same town from different ends.

Roughly one in five housing units here were built in 1939 or earlier, another 228 went up in the 1950s, and the city added no housing units at all during the 1990s. Excelsior is less than one square mile and its own plan calls it fully developed, with the next hundred units expected between 2020 and 2040 coming out of redevelopment rather than out of new land, so there’s no new build here for us to talk about and everything we’d be working on is a house that was already standing.

What makes the ductwork interesting is how these houses started, because the plan says the homes in the Village Area “were constructed as secondary homes for vacation purposes,” and its history chapter says that “As time went on, many of the seasonal dwellings were either replaced or remodeled into permanent homes.” A house that was only ever meant to be lived in for three months of summer didn’t have the heat in it from the start, and heat that goes in afterwards goes through crawl spaces and additions and whatever route was open at the time rather than through a system somebody drew before the walls went up, and that’s the kind of job we’d rather have than a straight trunk and branch in a new build.

Not every house here has ducts in it and we’d rather ask than assume, because 885 of the 1,272 occupied homes in Excelsior heat with gas and 353 heat with electricity, and in a town with this much pre war stock some of those are boilers and radiators with no duct system at all. About 160 owner households in the town have been in the same house since the 1990s or earlier while the median owner here moved in around 2014, so we get the person who’s lived with a system for thirty years and the person who just bought the place and wants to know what they bought. Either way we’d rather get in and look than tell you over the phone what seventy years has left inside a trunk line, and if what we find doesn’t need cleaning we’ll tell you that instead of selling you the job.

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 628 detached houses and 111 attached ones among Excelsior’s 1,530 units, and of the occupied homes 615 are owned against 657 rented, so half this town calls a landlord about the carpet and the person reading this is usually one of the few hundred who owns the floor they’re standing on.

The two halves of the town don’t wear their floors the same way either, with the Village Area on a modified grid of 5,000 to 7,000 square foot lots near downtown and bigger ones out along the Lake Minnetonka shore, and the streets south of Highway 7 running to cul de sacs, lots over 10,000 square feet and no sidewalks at all, so what walks in off the street isn’t the same in both places. Households here are small and settled, averaging 1.91 people with 45 percent of them one person living alone as of 2016 and 16 percent of residents 65 or over, and 84 owner households have been in the same house since 1989 or earlier, which tends to mean less traffic spread over a lot more years of it.

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.

The city counts 77 townhome units in the whole of Excelsior across five developments, so the long shared wall dryer run that keeps us busy out in the newer suburbs is almost nowhere to be found here, and we’re not going to sell you a problem you haven’t got. What we’re actually looking at is whatever your own house does between the laundry and the outside wall, and in a town where the city’s own plan says the seasonal dwellings got remodeled into permanent homes, that run is usually somebody’s later addition rather than part of the original build, so tell us on the phone where it comes out and roughly how far it goes.

There’s one limit and we’d rather have it printed here than have you find out on the day. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

The city counts 650 apartment and condominium units across 21 multiple family developments, and its own table doesn’t start where you’d expect, running from Courtland in 1900 through to Southshore in 1983 with the weight of it in the 1960s and early 1970s: Carriage Hill and Village in 1965, Tonkaway in 1966, three of them in 1968, Excelsior Manor in 1970, Windemere in 1971 and Baypointe in 1972. The plan says “Nearly three-quarters of Excelsior’s multiple family developments were constructed before 1972” and that “The last apartment building developed was Southshore apartments in 1983.”

If you rent one of those, the ducts are the building’s call rather than yours and we’d rather you knew that than paid for something that isn’t yours to pay for. If you own the condo, your building is somewhere on that table between 1900 and 1983 and there’s nothing newer for it to be, so whatever is running through it has been running through it for at least forty years unless somebody has been in and changed it, and it’s worth a phone call to find out which.