Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Medina, we drive out past at least two other cities.

Most of the towns we work in are older than this one, so Medina isn’t a place we walk into expecting forty years of ductwork. The census puts the median year built at 2000 for the housing here and at 2000 again for the homes people own, and the biggest building decade they’ve had is the 2010s at 763 of 2,412 units, with another 12 since 2020, so about a third of the city’s gone up since 2010.

That doesn’t make it a new city though, because the city’s own housing table counted 2,245 units in 2015 and put about 31 percent of them up before 1980, with almost half built between 1980 and 2009, so there’s a genuinely older third of Medina sitting underneath the newer half of it. We can’t tell from here which one your house is in and we’re not going to guess at it on a website when you can tell us in thirty seconds on the phone.

Roughly 700 homes out here are on their own private well and the city counts 702 septic systems, a number that hasn’t moved much since 2008, and Medina’s own septic page says those systems have to be inspected and the tanks pumped at least once every three years. So a good part of this city already runs on an interval with a licensed trade turning up to keep it, and ducts and dryer vents work on the same idea even though nobody’s making you do them.

Of the 2,152 households that own their home here, 1,246 moved in between 2010 and 2019 and another 278 have moved in since 2020, so most people in Medina bought a house that was new or close to it and never had the kind of move that makes anybody think about the ductwork. None of that tells you whether yours have ever had a brush through them and we’re not going to guess at it off a census table, so we’ll open one up and show you what’s in there, and if 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 puts the median Medina home at 10.0 rooms, 1,983 of the 2,412 housing units here are detached houses and 92 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied, so what we’re usually quoting out here is a whole house rather than a room or two, and the person reading this is the one who doesn’t have to ask anybody else about it.

Most of the Medina map isn’t subdivision at all, because the plan’s 2016 land use table carries 4,447 acres of rural residential at 26 percent of the city and another 3,208 acres of agricultural land against 916 acres of urban serviced detached housing, with rural residential capped at one lot per ten acres and no urban services planned out there through 2040. On that end of the city a booking is one big job at one address rather than three quick ones on the same street, and it’s why we ask where you want the van before we get there, since the hose run from the driveway can be a long one.

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.

Medina hasn’t really got a townhome end to it, with the census counting 175 single family attached units in the whole city against 1,983 detached houses and not one two unit building, so the shared wall runs that fill a lot of our week in the towns nearer home hardly come up out here. A ten room house puts the laundry wherever the floor plan put it and that can be a long way in from any outside wall, so when you call, tell us where the vent comes out and roughly how far you think it runs, because that’s what sets how long we’re on site rather than what you pay.

There’s one limit and we’d rather have it printed here than drive all the way out and tell you about it in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. It’s a straight limit rather than something anyone can talk us into, and it’s the same everywhere we go.

The city runs three separate and isolated water distribution systems, Hamel in the northeast, Independence Beach in the west and Morningside in the south, with a small part of south central Medina on Orono water and a small part of the southwest on Maple Plain’s, and the plan says most of the city’s land area falls outside all of it. On the sewer side there are four districts and about 40 miles of sanitary main, and the plan records 198 homes built before 1970 that nearly all started on their own septic and weren’t connected until after that, so out here your address tells us more about the job than the city name does.

Hamel, up in the northeast, is the oldest name on the map here, platted as a city as early as 1879 and named when the Lange Hamel family gave land to the railroad for the 1884 depot, and it shrank back to the size it is now after Highway 55 bypassed it in the 1950s. Loretto sits in the middle of all this as a separate city with its own government that happens to be surrounded by Medina, so if that’s your address you’re not in Medina at all, and we’d drive out to you the same way.