Close to three in ten homes inside the City of Manassas are townhouses, and about half of all City homes went up in the 1980s and 90s. In a townhouse the laundry is seldom on an outside wall, so the dryer vent has to cross a ceiling or thread between floor joists to reach the back of the house, and every turn in that run is a place for lint to settle.
Sudley, just past the city line, is older and closer to half townhouses, its median home built in 1977. A dryer vent line that old has outlasted several dryers, and the hose behind the current one is often the flimsy foil or plastic kind that crushes when the dryer gets pushed back. Bull Run is different again: half its homes are condos and apartments, and in a lot of those buildings the line inside the walls is the association’s, so ask management who handles it before you book.
Inside the City’s historic district, which covers the old downtown and the neighborhoods around it, the Architectural Review Board signs off on substantial changes to the outside of a house. Cleaning never touches the outside. If your dryer vent hood is broken, or the line needs a new way out through a wall, we’ll tell you first, so you can check with the City before anything gets cut.
Loch Lomond is the older single-family end of Manassas, most of it built before 1980. There the dryer vent usually takes the short way out through the nearest wall, so what goes wrong tends to be at the ends: a crushed hose against the wall, and a flap outside that lint has glued half shut.