Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Lake Elmo, you’re clear across the metro.

In 2010 there wasn’t a single household in this city on regional sewer, and that’s the city’s own table rather than our guess, with 2,776 households in Lake Elmo that year and every one of them on a private or a community system. The sewer it has now is what the plan calls “of relatively new construction, most of which has been constructed only since 2013,” about 23 miles of main, and the same chapter says “a large portion of the City remains outside these boundaries through 2040 and is generally served by private well and septic systems.” The plan counts 1,982 known septic systems in the city, mapped off Washington County data from June 2017, against a stock of 3,606 homes, plus about a dozen subdivisions running their own shared treatment plants, so the houses out here never got laid out along a trunk line the way a normal suburb does, they went up wherever a lot would hold a drain field.

Behind that is a fight the city hasn’t forgotten. Between 2000 and 2005 Lake Elmo and the Metropolitan Council went to court over how much the city had to grow, and the comprehensive plan says the case ended with a decision that “mandated that the City of Lake Elmo allow for and plan for the extension of urban services in its Comprehensive Plan, consequently dictating that the City must grow and change beyond its historical rural land use patterns,” which the plan itself calls easily the most defining issue for the City since 2000. The rural half isn’t going anywhere either, because the city forecasts 2,742 households still unsewered in 2040, thirty four fewer than it had in total in 2010, while its household count more than doubles to 8,200 over the same thirty years.

That leaves two different jobs sitting inside one city and you can’t tell which one you’ve got without the address, because the census counts 2,064 of 4,897 housing units built in 2010 or later, 1,578 of them through the 2010s and 486 since 2020, and another 1,228 that predate 1980, including 148 from 1939 or earlier, with 1,605 more in between from the 1980s through the 2000s. The median year built moved from 1981 in the city’s own 2011 to 2015 table to 2004 in the latest census, so the middle of this housing stock got about twenty three years younger in roughly a decade.

On a new build the ductwork sat in the walls while the rest of the house went up around it, so drywall dust and sawdust in the trunk lines is a normal thing to find in a house that’s only a few years old, and four in ten homes in this city are that new. The older ones are where the plan says they are, near the Old Village, Tablyn Park and the Cimarron park, and the heating in a house that age tends to have been worked on and added to a few times over. Which of those two Lake Elmos your address sits in changes what we’re walking into, so we’d rather have a panel off and a look inside the trunk line than tell you anything from a website, and if what’s in there doesn’t warrant the work we’ll tell you that and 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.

Lake Elmo Park Reserve takes up 2,178.9 acres in the middle of this city, 3.5 square miles of it, and Washington County runs it while the city’s own plan puts it at more than 84 percent of the protected park land inside the city limits. A county survey back in 2008 found it the most visited park in Washington County, and the city’s plan lists internal trail systems running through Inwood, Savona, Easton Village, Wildflower, Whistling Valley, Hunters Crossing, Stonegate and Heritage Park on top of that, so there’s a lot of ground out here for boots and paws to pick something up on and bring back through your front door.

What comes back in lands on a whole house rather than a unit, because 3,900 of the 4,897 homes the census counts here are detached and 93.5 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied, which leaves next to nobody out here calling a landlord about the carpet. That means hallways, bedrooms and a stair set more often than a room or two, so it’s $35 a room up to 200 square feet and $45 for a set of stairs, and a set is 13 steps.

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. We park in the driveway and run the hose from there, which on the lots out here can be a long run and doesn’t change what you pay.

There’s no shared wall story to tell you in Lake Elmo, because the census finds 226 single family attached units in the whole city against 3,900 detached and 574 manufactured homes, so the long shared townhome run that gets talked about everywhere else is a rare thing in this city. What’s here instead is a big detached house with the laundry sometimes sitting a long way in from an outside wall, so the thing worth telling us on the phone is which side of the house the vent comes out and how long a run you think it is, because that changes how long we’re there and not what you pay.

The manufactured homes are almost all at one address, the Cimarron park, which the city puts at about 510 units with its own private sewer collection and treatment system, and that’s around one in nine housing units in Lake Elmo. Those run their ducts under the floor and their vents come out low and short, which is real work but it isn’t the same work as a two story house, so we’d rather talk one through on the phone than have you book off a number written for a different kind of home.

There’s one limit and we’d rather have it printed here than carry it across the metro and mention it in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. It’s the same limit at every address we walk up to and nobody’s talked us out of it yet.

The city’s own history has developers for the St. Paul, Stillwater and Taylors Falls Railroad spotting the lake in the early 1870s, and by 1880 the railroad company had built a small resort community on the north end of it, with the Elmo Residence Park platted in 1884 and a power house going up in 1889 that gave the town “the first electric lights west of Chicago.” The village incorporated in 1925 and the plan says several of the structures built during the early 1900s are still in existence today, which is where the 148 housing units the census counts here from 1939 or earlier come from, and they’re the oldest houses we’d be walking into anywhere in this city.

Out at the Tri-Lakes, on Lakes Jane, Olson and DeMontreville, the plan describes shorelines “dotted with smaller residential lots that once were dominated by vacation homes that have now transitioned to full-time residences,” platted when the minimum lot sizes were much smaller than the ones the city requires today. In the late 1980s the city put in eight shared wastewater systems under a federal grant program to replace failing septic systems on private property, four of them in the Old Village and four in the Tri-Lakes area, and two of the Old Village four were replaced by city sewer in 2015 and 2016. A cottage that’s been lived in year round for decades and added onto more than once doesn’t have ductwork anybody can guess at from the driveway, so those are the ones we take our time over.