Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Wayzata, we work the towns either side of you.

The census puts the median year built for a Wayzata housing unit at 1988, and that figure isn’t any use to somebody standing in an old house here, because 786 units went up in this city between 2010 and 2019, the biggest decade in its entire history, while the structure table counts 790 units in buildings of fifty or more. Put those two next to each other and it’s near certain that most of that decade is apartments and condos downtown rather than houses, and all of it drags the median forward past everything on your street.

Set that block aside and the rest of Wayzata is genuinely old for this metro, because there are 111 units from 1939 or earlier, 93 from the 1940s, 178 from the 1950s, 202 from the 1960s and 353 from the 1970s, so out of the 2,355 housing units the city’s got in total, roughly 40 percent of them were standing before 1980 and about a quarter before 1970, and that’s the half of the city we’d be working in.

Where the old half came from is written down. The historical society runs a Resort Period from 1867 to 1897 and a Cottage Period from 1897 to 1929, records that after the Second World War “many local farms and summer cottages were converted for use as year-round, single-family homes,” and says that “By the 1950s, the town had been fully absorbed by the greater Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area.” Heat came to those houses late and it came in stages, so what we open in the old half of Wayzata tends to be a run that had to find its way around a crawl space and a couple of additions rather than a trunk line drawn on a blueprint, and those are the ones we’d rather be in.

The town itself is older than that again, platted in 1854 and incorporated as a village in 1883, and when it reincorporated as a charter city in 1929 it elected Rufus Rand as its first mayor, after which, in the society’s words, “water and sewer service was provided to every building, street lights were installed, roads were paved, and the public beach and park was opened.” A handful of properties never got connected and still haven’t, because the 2040 plan counts about fifteen subsurface sewage treatment systems left in the city, in the Hillside Drive neighborhood and on select parcels along Bushaway Road, most of them on the large wooded lots and in the older developments that went in before the sewer service area reached them.

The other half of it is that people don’t leave, because 141 owner households here moved in during 1989 or earlier and another 66 arrived through the 1990s, which is about one owner household in six that hasn’t had a move in roughly twenty five years to put the ductwork on anybody’s list, while on the rental side not one household is recorded as having been in place since before 2000. There’s no honest way to tell from a website what’s inside yours, so we’ll answer that one standing in your basement, and plenty of the time the answer is that they’re clean enough to leave alone.

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’s own surface water plan says of its two eastern drainage districts that runoff “sheet drains from relatively narrow rural road sections (i.e., no curb and gutter or storm sewer)” and that residents there “appear to prefer the almost rural character of the neighborhoods and have generally not been in favor of installing traditional urban stormwater conveyance facilities.” A narrow street with a soft shoulder and a canopy over it puts grit and leaf litter on a floor in a way a curbed street doesn’t, and grit is the part that works its way down into the pile instead of sitting on top where a vacuum can reach it.

Of the 2,064 occupied homes in Wayzata, 1,219 are owned and 845 are rented, so four in ten of the people reading this would be calling somebody else about the carpet rather than us, and among the owners the two ends of the city aren’t much alike either. The plan says the traditional core was platted with smaller lots “ranging from approximately 7,400 to 14,500 square feet,” while the estate category out west, south of Shoreline Drive and along Bushaway Road, runs two acres and up across “mature tree coverage, wetlands, and steep slopes.” We don’t quote off an address, we count rooms, so a small house in the core costs what a small house costs.

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.

The census counts 790 Wayzata units in buildings of fifty or more and another 235 in buildings of twenty to forty nine, so 1,025 units against the 931 detached houses in the whole city, which means there’s more of this town stacked up than there is standing on its own lot. That decides more here than it does in the suburbs we spend most of our week in, because our end of the dryer vent job never leaves the ground. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

In a detached house it’s the straightforward version of the work and it usually rides along with the duct job on the same visit, and the 201 attached homes in town are the ones worth a question first, because a run that leaves the laundry, turns twice and follows a shared wall can surface somewhere we can’t stand under, so say where yours comes out when you call and we’ll know before we book it whether it’s one we can reach.

154 of Wayzata’s 2,355 housing units are counted vacant and held “for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use,” which is about 6.5 percent of the city, and it’s the resort town still showing through in a census table. A house that gets closed up in October and opened again in spring is a different call from one somebody has been living in the whole time, and if that’s yours then the sensible time to have us out is before the season rather than a week into it.

What there isn’t here is anything new for us to talk about, because the 2040 plan says “As a fully built out community, developable land is scarce” and that Wayzata is “a fully-developed community, and no new trunk sewers are proposed,” while the earlier 2030 plan put a number on it and called the supply of land 98 percent built out. Every job we’d do in this city is in a house that was already standing, so post construction cleanup isn’t something we sell into Wayzata, and saying that up front beats letting you find it out.