Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Minnetonka, the houses here went in before the sewer did.

The city doesn’t hedge about it in its own 2040 plan, where it says that “Much of Minnetonka’s single-family housing stock was built between 1950 and 1970 while most multi-family housing was built in the 1970s and 1980s,” and that matters because the raw census decade table makes the 1980s look like the big decade at 5,965 units when the plan’s telling you those are apartments, so the houses are older than the table looks. There are 4,145 units here from the 1950s and 2,890 from the 1960s, with another 616 built in 1939 or earlier and 593 in the 1940s, so about a third of everything in the city was standing before 1970.

The census puts the median owner occupied house in Minnetonka at 1974, which makes the middle one an owner lives in about 52 years old, and the same table on the same release puts Maple Grove at 1989, so the middle house here has about fifteen years on the middle house up there. The city’s history page says that “During the mid 1970s, city sewer and water lines replaced individual septic tanks and wells in most of Minnetonka,” and the plan’s engineering chapter dates the sanitary sewer to “the late 1960s and 1970s,” so a lot of these houses were built, lived in and heated before the street they sit on had public utilities under it, and they didn’t get connected until later.

The oldest neighborhoods started in the 1930s and the plan names them, Oak Knoll up by County Road 73 and I-394, Groveland, the Gray’s Bay and Libbs Lake area, Tonkawood Croft south of Minnetonka Boulevard and Glen Lake, and it describes what they were as “modest single family homes located on one-third to one-half acre lots served by private sewage treatment systems and individual wells.” The big development came in on the east edge next to St. Louis Park and Hopkins in the mid to late 1950s, then Somerset Knolls, Forest Hills and Temple Village went in along Highway 7 through the 1960s, and the plan says those “prompted the then Village of Minnetonka to begin developing municipal sewer and water services.” So a house here has usually been added to, re-piped and re-ducted in stages over seventy years, and that’s why the runs go where they go instead of where a drawing put them.

Nobody moves either, with 2,920 owner households in the same house since 1989 or earlier and another 2,619 who moved in during the 1990s, so about a third of all the owners in this city haven’t had a move in event since 1999, and the plan calls it “low turnover rates in the existing housing stock with many seniors aging in place.” We’re not going to tell you from a website that yours have never been opened, because we can’t know that from here, but we’ll tell you what we find when we open them 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 counts 13,324 detached houses and 2,591 attached townhomes among Minnetonka’s 24,760 units, and 71.6 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied against 6,681 rented, so seven households in ten decide about their own floors here and the other three call a landlord, which is a lower owner share than the census gives Maple Grove and it’s worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on the phone.

The minimum single family lot in an established neighborhood is half an acre and it was a third of an acre before 1965, which is why the plan can say that “Today, the appearance of residential land uses within the city is one of overall spaciousness” and that the residential areas are “well maintained within spacious, well-vegetated neighborhoods.” The city counts 960 acres of park and another 1,808 of public and private open space, about 15 percent of everything inside the city limits, plus 664 acres of water, so what we’re pulling out of a Minnetonka floor is whatever came off a big planted lot on four feet or two, sand and leaf litter and whatever the dog rolled in, worn down the middle of a hallway and around the door people actually use.

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.

Half acre minimums build out sideways rather than up, so the ramblers and splits that fill this city put the laundry a long way from whatever wall the vent comes out of, and a run that long with a couple of turns in it gives lint a lot of places to sit down. The 2,591 attached townhomes here do the same thing for a different reason, because a shared wall pushes the run around the outside of the plan, and those are the two shapes we’d be pulling apart out here.

The planting is the other half of it, since a mature yard on a big lot tends to have something growing right where the vent terminates, and lint packs into a hooded outlet behind a shrub faster than it does into one sitting in the open. Tell us on the phone roughly where yours comes out and how far it runs from the dryer, and we’ll know what we’re bringing.

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.

This city doesn’t read like one planned suburb because it never was one. Minnetonka Township voted itself into a village in 1956, 2,309 votes to 1,275 on the twenty second of August, and it didn’t become a city until 1968, and in the ten years before that vote Deephaven, Wayzata, Hopkins and St. Louis Park annexed developed pieces out of it and took the township from 36 square miles down to 28 while its population went from 6,466 in 1940 to about 15,600 by 1956. What’s left is a set of separate settlements that grew into each other, so the era of the housing changes block to block instead of by subdivision phase, and we’d rather ask what year yours went up than assume it matches next door.

The other thing worth knowing is that it’s finished. The city’s 2018 land use table counts 22 vacant acres out of 18,066 and the plan calls Minnetonka “a fully developed city with little vacant or underdeveloped land available for new housing development,” so there’s no new construction cleanup for us to sell you out here and anything we’d come out for is an existing house, which suits us fine because that’s the work we’re set up for.