Window Cleaning in Victoria, MN

Lakes, parks and a downtown on Stieger Lake

Victoria sits on the southwest edge of Lake Minnetonka in Carver County and calls itself the City of Lakes and Parks. Besides its share of the big lake, the city lists Lake Virginia, Schutz Lake, Lake Zumbra and Lake Auburn among its lakes, and it looks after 32 parks and more than 400 acres of reserved land. Downtown, Bayfront Park sits on Stieger Lake, looking across to Carver Park Reserve, and hosts free Live by the Lake concerts on summer Wednesday evenings.

Swiss immigrants settled the area in 1852, and the village that grew up here, named for St. Victoria Church, incorporated in 1915. It has grown quickly in recent years: 7,345 residents at the 2010 census, 10,546 in 2020, and more than 12,000 by the city’s estimate in its 2025 budget, with new neighborhoods still going in.

Hard groundwater and a midday sprinkler ban

Victoria’s wells feed a plant that removes iron and manganese, but water-treatment companies still put the city’s water at roughly 18 to 24 grains of hardness per gallon, well into the very-hard range. From May through September, the city bans irrigation with city water from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., so sprinklers come on in the morning and evening, and a head aimed at the house leaves its minerals on the glass. Second-story panes get a final rinse of purified water from our poles, which dries without spotting; set-in spots need hard-water stain removal, priced after we’ve seen the glass.

Built since 2000, and built big

Real-estate data put about 62 percent of Victoria’s housing after 2000, and big homes are common. Houses that size put glass on every level, from patio doors off the kitchen to dormers and half-round windows up by the roofline. Water-fed poles let our crew clean most of that upper glass with both feet on the ground, and the ladder is for the few windows out of a pole’s reach.

Close to woods, marshes and water

Carver Park Reserve’s Lowry Nature Center, on Victoria Drive, was the first public nature center built in the Twin Cities, and its trails wind past lakes, tamarack bogs, cattail marshes and hardwood forest. Homes near that kind of landscape tend to see more pollen on their windows and more cobwebs in the frame corners, and screens collect the same buildup. As an add-on, we pull every screen, hand-wash both faces and the frame, and reinstall each one in the window it belongs to.