Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Greenwood, everybody who works here drives in.

Developers platted this shoreline at the turn of the last century in parcels “often in small sizes intended for cabins” and the city says many of those lots are still of record today, and then comes the sentence that matters to us, because those cabin sites “have largely been converted to locations for year-round, single-family residences” and “Most of these have been substantially rebuilt and / or demolished and rebuilt.” Greenwood doesn’t expect anything else between now and 2040 either, only “the remodeling and teardown / replacement of individual single-family homes,” so the year on your deed and the age of the thing blowing air around your house aren’t the same number, and what we open up here is usually two or three eras of work joined together with the dust of the last remodel still sitting in the trunk line.

People don’t move out of Greenwood, and the city looked that up rather than assumed it, going to the Hennepin County Assessor’s sales book and finding 14 of 313 single family and condominium properties changed hands across a year it calls a busy one, which works out to 4.5 percent. The city’s own housing table counts 289 ownership units here against 41 rentals, so the person reading this is usually the one who decides, and a house that hasn’t changed hands in twenty years never had the move that makes somebody think about the ductwork, so we can’t tell you from a website what’s in yours, but we’ll tell you what we find when we open it and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

The ground runs from 990 feet at the northeast corner of St. Alban’s Bay down to 930 at the lake, the city’s own words for it are “gently to steeply rolling hills,” and Greenwood doesn’t have an overall storm sewer system, so water goes overland and the houses step down the slope toward the water, which gives us a lower level cut into the hill with finished rooms in it and a supply run that’s got the whole height of the house to travel before it reaches 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 land use chapter of the city’s plan says 44 percent of the residences in Greenwood have lakeshore on Lake Minnetonka, and with two thirds of the city limits being open water that’s the shape of the job here, a house with a lawn running down to the water and a door at the bottom of it that everybody uses. What comes back up that slope is sand off a dock, wet grass and whatever was in the boat, and it doesn’t get spread around the house, it lands on the same few feet of carpet every time.

Something worth telling us on the phone is where your water comes from, because Greenwood has no municipal system and no water tower and the city says most property owners here are still on private wells, with two exceptions that get Excelsior water, the St. Alban’s Bay Villas and the properties along Excelsior Boulevard as far as Maple Heights Road. The plan says the well water here is acceptable apart from a high iron content, and most cleaners would turn up assuming you’re on city water like everybody else, so we’d rather ask you about a mark on a carpet than guess at what put it there.

It’s truck mounted hot water extraction and the machine never leaves the van, which pulls far more water back out of the carpet than any portable unit manages, so the room that takes all of it is dry again by the evening if we clean it in the morning, in normal conditions.

A lot of what we do in the newer suburbs is a townhome dryer run that turns twice and shares a wall with the neighbors, and none of that applies to you, because the entire multifamily stock of this city is two buildings, Georgetown Manor which the plan calls the only rental apartment building in Greenwood and the St. Alban’s Bay Villas which it calls the only condominium, with fewer than forty units between the two of them. 296 of the 330 housing units here are single family, so the vent’s your own, and in a city the plan describes as substantially rebuilt or demolished and rebuilt it’s often part of somebody’s later work rather than 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.