Missionary Ridge Historic District · North and South Crest Road
Carpet cleaning on Missionary Ridge, where the work is downhill from the van
The ridge stands roughly 500 feet above the city, the buildable top is narrow enough that Crest Road takes up most of it, and the carpeted rooms usually sit a floor below the street. Everything comes off the van by hand and goes down the inside stair, and the floor is usable again about an hour after we leave. About 12 minutes from downtown Chattanooga.
- ★ 4.9 · 510 Google reviews
- 3 rooms from $109
- Dry in about an hour
- Stairs typically $40–$50 a flight
Current offers
What you can knock off this visit
Grab them while they are up. Say which one you want when you book, or hold your phone up to the technician at the door.
Five miles long, 1,100 feet wide
A road with almost nothing on either side of it
For six years, from 1923 until annexation in 1929, the ridge ran itself as a separate city. The historic district that marks it today is only about 1,100 feet across. Five miles long, and that narrow. The sides fall away almost vertically.
Two lanes run the crest, houses face each other across them, and national park reservations sit in the gaps between those houses. There is no apron to pull onto and no shoulder worth the name, so we work from a street space like everybody else who drives up here. The Park Service asks visitors to keep private drives clear, and we hold ourselves to the same line.
Everything comes off the van by hand, so tell us at booking which side of the road the house is on and we will take the space with the shortest walk to your door.
Where the carpet actually is
The floor you walk in on faces the view. The bedrooms are under it.
On a slope this steep a house gets built into the hill rather than set on top of it. The entry level takes the valley side for the windows, and the den and the bedrooms step down behind it into ground that was cut away to hold them. That lower floor is where most of the carpet on this ridge lives. The gear comes in from the curb, through the house, and keeps going down.
One staircase usually serves all of it. The older houses along these two lanes run to Queen Anne, Classical Revival, Colonial Revival, Spanish Eclectic, Tudor Revival and bungalow, and a house drawn that way has one main stair serving the whole building. Up here that stair often runs through three floors.
Grade decides where the dirt lands as well. The slopes below the road shed soil in every season, the kudzu on them holds none of it, and no door on this ridge is reached without a climb or a drop. Whatever comes in at the top gets walked downward, tread by tread, so the staircase ends up carrying more than any room it connects. So we count the stairs first here and the rooms second, and work the treads one at a time.
There is very little water in this process, so boards of that age never take a soaking. What the pile is holding comes up and away, and nothing is left behind to catch the next load, so a floor cleaned here stays clean about three times longer. How the low-moisture clean works is written out in full on the service page.
Before and after
Floors our crews photographed on the day
Every image here belongs to a job somebody paid for, taken by the technician who did it, once before anything started and once at the end. The owner chose them out of the whole company's work, so they come from several of the towns we cover. The pass behind them is the pass that comes down your stairs.
How people place a house up here
A road laid for battlefield visitors, and a streetcar that made it an address
The ridge was farms until the streetcar climbed it in 1887 and turned the top into an address for industrialists, politicians and professional men. Residents formed their own taxing district in 1911 to get water piped up, the central section of the school followed in 1912, and the crest filled in along both sides of the road through those same years.
Crest Road began as Government Boulevard, built after the national military park was created in 1895 so that visitors could reach the battlefield, and the federal government laid the crest in concrete across 1929 and 1930. The Missionary Ridge Historic District joined the National Register on 5 September 1996, running from the DeLong reservation down to 700 South Crest Road.
The reservations come with the address: Iowa, Bragg, Ohio, Turchin, DeLong, the Phelps Monument, the 73rd Pennsylvania and Sherman, the last of them 50 acres. Several sit in and beside front gardens, with artillery a few steps off a porch, and strangers read them from first light until dusk every day of the year. It shapes how a morning on this street runs, and we plan the visit around it.
Streets we work on the ridge
- North Crest Road · South Crest Road
- Brockhaven Drive
- Clearview Avenue
- Court Drive East
- Mission Terrace · Rose Terrace
- Ridge Avenue · Shallowford Road
Directions here get given by tunnel. The first one opened near McCallie School in 1913, the twin 1,000-foot Bachman Tubes followed in 1929, and the Wilcox Tunnel, longest of the three, opened in 1931. The Ridge Cut carries the interstate through on its own.
Stairs first, rooms second
What a ridge visit covers, from the curb down
A three-room visit starts at $109, and the 450 square feet it allows for is measured across all three together. The stairs, an extra bedroom, a hall on its own: every one of them is walked with you first, and the figure lands in your hand at the door, before a single piece of gear is unloaded.
Area rugs are handled by size. Wool, silk and an Oriental carried up here two generations ago all get the same patient, low-moisture treatment, with nothing added for what they were woven from. We work on them in the room they already sit in, so nothing of yours goes down the stairs and out to the street. The detail is on the page for area rugs cleaned in your own house, and the furniture page covers a sofa or a pair of chairs once the care tag has been read.
Love the clean or it's free, and that covers the stairs as squarely as it covers the rooms. Call 423-284-0493 any day but Sunday, 8 AM to 6 PM, or send a photo of the staircase to 423-284-0493 and a price comes back on the same thread.
from $1093 rooms cleaned
Down off the ridge
Other parts of Chattanooga, TN on the same route sheet
The city side of this ridge drops away sharply and the Brainerd side lets you down gently, and we work both of them off the same route sheet. The whole picture sits on our Chattanooga carpet cleaning page.
What Missionary Ridge callers ask before booking
Your van has to sit on Crest Road. How far can you reach from there?
Far enough for the houses on both sides of it. The equipment comes off the van by hand, gets carried from a street space to your front door, and from there goes down the inside stair to whichever level the carpet is on. Tell us at booking which side of the road you are on and how far back the house sits, and we will take the space that keeps the carry short. Every driveway on the block stays clear, including yours.
Most of our carpet is on the lower floor. Does that change the price?
No. A room costs the same whatever level it sits on, so a den and two bedrooms cut into the hillside is the three-room job starting at $109, exactly as it would be on flat ground. The stair between the floors is its own line, typically $40 to $50 a flight. The drop only changes how we set up, and that part is ours to sort out rather than yours to pay for.
One stair runs through all three floors of this house. Is that one flight or two?
It is counted by flight, so a run broken by a landing partway down counts as two. We walk it with you and write the number on the quote before anything is switched on, which keeps the arithmetic off the end of the visit. On this ridge the stairs are reliably the dirtiest surface in the building, because soil that comes in at the top gets carried down every tread on the way to the bedrooms.
People stop at the monument outside our house all day. Do we need to move them?
Not on our account. We take a public space the same as anyone else who drives up, and we work around whoever is out reading a tablet or looking at the guns. If somebody is parked tight to your walk we will wait, or carry a little further. If you would rather have the street quiet, ask for an early slot: we start at 8 AM every day but Sunday.
Back on your floor before lunch is over.
Low-moisture deep clean, dry in about an hour · Love the clean or it's free.