Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Monticello, you’re the farthest town on our list.

The biggest thing that ever happened to housing in this city was the 2000s, when 1,983 of Monticello’s 5,766 homes went up inside that one decade, which is 34.4 percent of everything standing here, and the 1990s had already put up another 1,283 before it. The census has the median home in the city at 1999 and the median owner occupied one at 2000, so the house we’re most likely to be pulling up to here is about twenty five years old.

Underneath that there’s a genuinely old Monticello, because 274 of the units in this city were built in 1939 or earlier and the census records none at all, not one, through the whole of the 1940s, then 146 in the 1950s and 98 in the 1960s. The city’s own housing report puts that stock where you’d expect it, saying the areas with “older housing stock and low ratios” are “the downtown and central city” while “greenfield construction will increase values on the edges of the City”, so a house four blocks off Broadway isn’t the same job as one out in a subdivision that went in twenty years ago and we don’t turn up expecting it to be.

3,011 of Monticello’s 3,683 owner households moved into the house they’re in before 2020, 1,340 of them sixteen years or more, and 1,271 own the place outright with no mortgage left on it at all, so what we get called out to here is more often a house somebody settled into and stayed in than one that’s just changed hands. Nobody can tell you off a website whether anyone’s ever had a brush down your trunk line and we’re not going to try, but you’ll get a straight answer once we’ve got the covers off, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll tell you that standing in your basement rather than sell you the job.

There’s somebody home in a lot of these houses through the day, because 21.5 percent of Monticello households have somebody sixty five or over in them and 688 of those are one person living on their own, while 38.3 percent have somebody under eighteen. 77.9 percent of the occupied homes here run on utility gas and another 18.5 percent on electricity, which is a higher electric share than the towns around you carry, though that table is recording the fuel rather than how the heat gets around the house, so it doesn’t tell you whether there’s a duct behind your wall and we won’t pretend it does.

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.

Monticello is the one town out this way where we can’t assume the person reading this owns the place, because 64.7 percent of the occupied homes here are owner occupied on the 2024 census figures, 3,683 of 5,695, with another 2,012 households renting, and that’s a long way under the 88 to 93 percent the other Wright County towns we work in run at. If you’re renting, whose job the ducts are is a conversation with whoever owns the place rather than with us, and we’ll take that call from either of you and give the same number to both.

The city said the same thing about itself years before the census did, because its downtown plan states that Monticello “offers more townhomes, apartments, and mobile homes than other cities in Wright County” and puts single family at 54 percent of all units. That 54 counts detached houses only, and once the 801 attached townhomes go back in it’s about two thirds of the city, with 505 manufactured homes and 1,209 units in buildings of five or more making up most of the rest, which is why the first thing we ask on the phone is what sort of place we’re coming to.

2,183 of the households here have somebody under eighteen in them, that’s 38.3 percent, and the city’s plan runs its river trail from Montissippi Park at the northwest end down to Mississippi River Park with the Bertram Chain of Lakes described in its own public engagement as “the crown jewel”, so a lot of what we get called out for here came in through a door off one of those and stopped in the first ten feet of carpet inside it. Pet treatment is $25 a room on top of the room price when you want it and you’ll hear that before we start rather than off the invoice, and the machine itself never comes inside, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction that stays out in the van and pulls far more water back out of the carpet than any portable unit does, so a morning clean is dry by the evening in normal conditions.

801 of the homes in Monticello are attached townhomes, 13.9 percent of the city against 3,020 detached houses, and a dryer run in an attached home has further to go and more corners to take before it ever reaches an outside wall, so there’s a lot more of it for lint to stop in. That’s still the growing end of town too, because Carlisle Village put in another 73 attached townhomes in 2022 and Stoney Brook Village had 28 twinhomes approved for 2024.

The other 505 are manufactured homes, and the city’s plan names exactly where they are, “the West Side Park and River Terrace along River Street and Kjellberg’s Manufactured Home Park along State Highway 25 in the southern part of the City”, and says in the same paragraph that it means to recognize and maintain those neighborhoods. They’re also the homes where the vent comes out somewhere we can get at it, which is the one thing that decides whether we can do the job at all.

There’s one limit and we’d rather print it here than have you find out on the day. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. With 339 homes in this city sitting in buildings of fifty units or more, that comes up more often here than it does out in the subdivision towns, and it’s a straight limit rather than something anybody can talk us into.

The town goes back to the 1850s and the downtown plan still calls Broadway Street “the historic center of town”, with the Mississippi “only two blocks from the storefront district”, while the comprehensive plan lays its Traditional Neighborhood designation over “portions of the riverfront and properties along River Street and Broadway Avenue” and describes those streets as having “residential-scaled streets, sidewalks, large street trees and mature housing stock”. Houses that age don’t come in one pattern, so down there we’d sooner look at what’s actually in the walls than put a number on it over the phone.

At the other end the city is nowhere near done, because its own 2023 housing report counts 1,137 units planned or built between January 2020 and June 2023, which it calls “a construction level not seen in many years”, and it names Haven Ridge with 27 houses in 2021, Featherstone’s 5th and 6th Additions with 26 and 21, and Edmonson Ridge with 54 between 2021 and 2023. If yours is one of those, the ductwork was sitting in the walls while the rest of the house was still being built around it, so that’s a first year phone call rather than a tenth year one.

Past the city line it’s still Monticello Township, because the annexation agreement out here is a live one rather than a finished one, and the plan says property inside the Orderly Annexation Area “will retain their existing uses until requests for annexation and development under the Orderly Annexation Agreement occurs”, which means rural residential and agricultural properties that aren’t on the city’s water and sewer sitting right outside the line. It’s a city that runs a fair amount of its own machinery either way, including a municipal telecommunications utility called FiberNet that’s one of the three community enterprises it operates.