House cleaning in Northbrook, IL

Northbrook is an inland town rather than a lakefront one, and that is the first thing to know about it. It does not touch Lake Michigan, it has no bluff and no ravine lots, and it sits on the Milwaukee District North line into Union Station rather than the Union Pacific line the lakefront towns use. Its water feature is the West Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River. Somme Prairie on Dundee Road is a dedicated Illinois Nature Preserve, and the village grew out of the old Shermerville around Shermer Road.

The housing is unambiguously postwar. The median Northbrook house was built in 1976 and only about four percent of the village predates 1940, so genuinely prewar houses are a rounding error here. A third of the stock went up between 1940 and 1969 as ranches, split-levels, Cape Cods and colonials on quarter- to half-acre subdivision lots, and another third between 1970 and 1989 as larger two-storey houses, along with most of the attached stock. Later custom infill sits on top of both.

So the materials are midcentury rather than prewar: drywall and forced air instead of plaster and radiators, wall-to-wall carpet in the houses that have not been rebuilt, and split-levels that run in half-flights with nothing rolling between them. The village pumps and treats its own Lake Michigan water, so there is ordinary scale on shower glass and chrome and none of the mineral load a private well leaves. One caution worth knowing: a Northbrook mailing address is not proof of village water, because parts of unincorporated Northfield Township carry a 60062 address and are still on wells.

Enter 60062 and your rooms and the price is on the screen before you give us your name. If your house is one of the unincorporated ones on a well, and the shower glass shows it, say so in the request notes.