Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Sunfish Lake, we’d cross the metro for a house like yours.

The census puts the median build year in Sunfish Lake at about 1985 and the city’s own plan says more than half the homes here have gone up since 1970, but the spread underneath that is wider than most places we go, because the Age of Structures map in the plan brackets the housing from 1865 to 1900 at one end through to 1990 to 2006 at the other. On lots from 0.45 to 12.9 acres that means a nineteenth century house with a retrofitted system and a 1990s estate with long trunk runs and more than one zone sit in the same small city, so it’s worth telling us what you’ve actually got when you call rather than assuming one house here is much like the next.

Almost none of it is on city services and that’s on purpose rather than by accident. The comprehensive plan directs the city to “Prohibit the extension of public utilities and require the use of private well and septic facilities,” and the stormwater plan says water and sewer here are mainly provided by individual wells and septic systems, with the only exceptions being five homes in the northwest corner and some properties along Charlton Road that take sewer and water from Mendota Heights under a joint powers agreement. A house that makes its own water and treats its own waste is a house whose owner already deals with trades directly, which is most of what we do all day.

City ordinance has those septic tanks inspected and the solids removed every three years, with the paperwork filed to Dakota County Environmental Services, so people here are already used to a truck in the driveway on a schedule and a record of it afterward. Ducts don’t have an ordinance behind them and we’re not going to tell you yours have never been opened, because we can’t know that from a website, but we’ll tell you what we find once we’ve got a panel off, 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.

It’s the ground under this city that makes carpet work hard in it, because the stormwater plan describes the topography as moraine with many slopes and wetlands and the soils as the Kingsley-Mahtomedi series, well drained and excessively drained, formed in loamy and sandy glacial till and sandy outwash. On top of that the city employs its own Forester and runs a Comprehensive Tree Preservation program, so what comes in through the door here is fine sand off a slope plus the leaf litter, pollen and seed of a canopy the city pays somebody to protect.

Then there’s how you get to the house, because the plan says the local network is a mix of public roads and private drives giving direct lot access, public street access only became the standard for new homes in 1995, and as recently as its 2018 stormwater plan the city was still planning to upgrade Charlton Road from gravel to bituminous. The three lakes are all inside private property with no public access anywhere in the city limits, so the water that gets walked back into a lower level here comes off your own frontage rather than a public beach.

It’s hot water extraction off a truck mount, so the machine stays out in the van and only the hose comes down the drive, and it pulls far more water back out of the carpet than a portable does, which is why a morning clean is dry by the evening in normal conditions. Tell us where the van can sit when you call, because on a long private drive that decides how much hose we run rather than what you pay.

Every housing unit the census records in Sunfish Lake is single family detached, there’s no attached stock at all, and the zoning ordinance behind that runs to three districts in total, single family residential, institutional and a shoreland overlay, so there’s no shared wall story to tell you and no association to call. What you’ve got instead is a big detached house where the laundry can sit a long way from an outside wall, and the useful thing to tell us on the phone is where the vent comes out and roughly how far it runs.

There’s one limit on the dryer vents and it goes here rather than in your driveway after we’ve come the length of the metro to get to it. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. These are big houses on wooded, sloping lots, so tell us where yours comes out when you book, and it’s a straight limit rather than something anyone can talk us into.