Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in St. Michael, we travel out to you, over the Crow River.

The biggest single decade of building here is the 2000s, 2,296 homes out of the 7,307 in the city, with the 1990s behind it at 1,301 and the 1980s at 1,137, and the census puts the median year built at 1998, so the typical St. Michael house is about twenty eight years old. It isn’t a new city though, because 1,423 of those units predate 1980 and 407 of them were built in 1939 or earlier, which is more than the whole of the 1950s and 1960s put together, and that older group is the village around the 1866 downtown at Highway 241 and County Road 19, with the Town Center laid out beside it off the city’s 1999 and 2000 planning work.

The reason one city holds two housing stocks is a merger, and the plan says it straight: “The annexation of Frankfort Township by the City of St. Michael in 1996 expanded city services to a much larger area and also spurred more growth.” Before that, Frankfort Township allowed one acre lot subdivisions where they touched an existing one and the plan names the ground near Lake Wilhelm northeast of I-94, while the merger of 1996 and 1997 “required all development to be on City sewer and water.” So you’ve got a platted subdivision on city sewer and an older acreage place on its own well and septic sitting inside the same city limits, and the plan says both halves out loud, that “Sewer services are provided to urban areas of the City” and that “There are numerous private wells in the rural parts (or those areas without municipal services) of St. Michael.” Those are two different jobs and two different quotes, which is why we’ll ask about the house before we give anybody a number.

84.3 percent of the occupied homes here heat with utility gas, 6,063 of them, and another 191 run on bottled or tank gas, which is the quiet tell for the properties out where there’s no gas main. We don’t guess at what’s behind your walls off a census table, so we’ll look when we get there.

What matters more than the year on the deed is how long people stay, and 2,758 of the 6,476 owner households in St. Michael moved in during 2009 or earlier with 1,001 of those already in before 2000, so better than four owners in ten have been in the same house fifteen years or more. A move is usually the thing that makes somebody think about the ducts in the first place and without one the years go by, but we’re not going to tell you yours have never been opened because we can’t know that from a website, so 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.

82 percent of the housing in St. Michael is a detached single family house and another 13 percent is an attached townhome, and there’s very little else after that, because only 321 units in the whole city sit in a building of ten or more and the census records no mobile homes at all. 90.1 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied, 6,476 out of 7,189, so the person on the phone is nearly always the person who owns the carpet and has to live with how it comes out.

The plan puts “37 square miles” inside the city limits and describes “rolling farmlands, a dozen lakes, and preserved woods and open spaces” in among the houses, and on the acreage side of the merger there’s a lot more ground between your door and the road than a platted subdivision has. Whatever’s out there comes back in through the one door on the same pair of feet, so the first stretch of hallway takes it before any other carpet in the house does, and if you want pet treatment it’s $25 a room on top of the room price and you’ll hear that before we start rather than on the invoice.

It’s truck mounted hot water extraction, so the machine never comes past your door and a lot more water comes back out of the carpet than a portable unit will ever pull, and a job we clean in the morning is dry by the evening in normal conditions.

960 of the homes here are attached townhomes, about 13 percent of the stock, and the plan says permits for attached dwellings “rose to a peak in year 2002 and then sharply declined in 2006,” so a lot of that shared wall housing has had a dryer running out the same wall for twenty years or more. We’re not going to tell you a townhome vent lints up faster than a rambler’s because nobody has measured that and we’d be making it up, and anyway the other 5,990 homes in this city are detached, which is the bigger part of what we’d be out here for.

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.

The city keeps adding houses, and its own plan says “The number of housing units in St. Michael grew from 5,043 (2010) to 6,210 (2020), with the number of building permits increasing since 2016.” Separately the census counts 392 units built in 2020 or later and another 758 through the 2010s, and if that’s your house then the ductwork sat open to the site while the place was cut, sanded and drilled around it, which is worth a call before you unpack.

It isn’t only subdivisions either, because in 2018 the city drew a Rural Residential district east of I-94 and generally north of Foster Lake, saying it “wanted to accommodate the demand for new acreage residential lots without City sewer and water” and that it picked that ground for “the patchwork of existing large residential lot subdivisions, abundant natural resources, and challenges with cost-effectively providing City sewer and water.” So the acreage half of the merger is still being added to and not just the sewered half, and that’s why we ask what you’re on before we quote anything.