Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Tonka Bay, we’re further off than the map says.

The census puts roughly a quarter of Tonka Bay’s housing at 1939 or earlier, with another group through the forties and fifties, and then the 1960s barely show up at all, a dozen or so units in the whole city. The biggest decade after the war is the 1980s at about a fifth of the stock, the nineties come next and they’re a fair way behind it, and the median owner occupied house lands at 1980, give or take five years.

Both humps are in the city’s own history. Tonka Bay was a Lake Minnetonka resort town first, with the Lake Park Hotel up in 1879 and the Old Orchard House in 1887, it incorporated in 1901, and the elementary school built in 1904 is the building that’s City Hall today on Manitou Road. Then the plan dates the second wave to the late 1980s and mid 1990s, when “New developments are built on the grounds of great estates of the past, such as the Clay Cliffe Estate, Arbor Shores, and the W.O. Winston Estate, now known as the subdivision of Gideon’s Point,” so the eighties houses here are old estate grounds cut up rather than a farm field turned into a subdivision.

Not much has gone up since, and what does get built usually means somebody’s old house came down first, because city records for 2009 through 2016 show 24 teardown and rebuilds, nine teardowns with nothing put back and exactly one new home on vacant land, an average of about three new units a year. There’s 15.13 acres of vacant land left in the entire city, thirty four scattered parcels of it, so one street out here can run a 1920s cottage, a house off one of the estate subdivisions and a rebuild with sheet metal only a few years old, and we don’t know which of those we’re standing in until the cover’s off.

Two things we can tell you before we come. There’s no septic to work around anywhere in this city, because the plan says Tonka Bay is “completely served by the City’s sanitary sewer system” and that “There are no known individual sewage treatment systems/septic systems within the City.” And about nine in ten occupied houses in town heat on gas, which usually means a furnace pushing air through ducts, though an old lake cottage can just as well be running a boiler and radiators and we’ve stopped assuming either way. Nobody can tell you off a website whether your ducts have ever been opened and we’re not going to try, so what you’ll get from us is what we actually find once we’ve got them open, and if it doesn’t want 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 city counts 332 of its dwellings, about half of them, with lakeshore frontage or deeded lake rights, and its plan says “Virtually the entire City is within only a few hundred feet of the lake.” What that comes to on a floor is sand. Between the beach at Wekota Park, Crescent Beach off Birch Bluff Road and the 49 slips at the city marina, whatever’s on the bottom of the lake gets walked up a dock, across a yard and into a hallway all summer, and sand settles down into the pile rather than sitting on top of it where a vacuum can reach.

661 of the 673 dwellings the city counted are detached single family houses and it counted 654 of them owner occupied in 2017, before the one apartment building went up, so it’s the owner of the floor reading this in nearly every case, and the person who books us is the person who writes the check. What we won’t do is quote off the address, because land is about 64 percent of what property is worth in this city and half the town has no lake frontage at all, so the notion that every house in Tonka Bay is an estate isn’t true and we count rooms instead.

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.

In 2016 the city counted 12 units in all of Tonka Bay that weren’t a detached single family house, twelve out of 673, so almost nobody here has a dryer duct running along a wall they share with a neighbor. Yours goes from your own laundry to your own outside wall, and on lots that run from forty feet wide to over an acre that could be a six foot run or it could turn twice and cross the house, so tell us on the phone where it comes out and roughly how far it goes.

The exception is one building. The old Tonka Village site is where the maximum density went from ten units an acre up to twenty, a change the Metropolitan Council reviewed in November 2018, and what stands on it now is Carrick, 86 units of apartments and “two-story direct entry townhomes” with a washer and dryer in each one, open since late 2021. That’s the only address in town with stacked laundry and shared wall runs in it, and it’s a property manager’s decision rather than a homeowner’s, so if that’s you, call us and we’ll talk about the building rather than a unit.

One limit, and we’d rather have it on the page than spring it on you in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.