There’s always ‘Moore’ to construct
Moore Construction provides necessary exterior home improvements

Matt Moore, pictured above with one of his trucks, graduated from Blue Earth Area before going to college to study construction management. He came back to the area after college and in 2015 he restarted the construction business his father had originally begun back in 1975.
Making a home a better place to live doesn’t just involve work on the interior of the house. Sometimes improvements around the exterior of the home can not only enhance the living space, but also make it a safer place to live.
“We rebuild a lot of concrete driveways,” Matt Moore of Moore Construction in Blue Earth says. “Some old garage pads are not in good shape anymore.”
Moore says many older sidewalks can become uneven and become tripping hazards.
“In the case of some commercial properties we have worked on, the owners seek the improvements because they are worried about insurance claims which might arise from people falling because of uneven surfaces,” Moore adds.
He notes some of his clients are people who are getting older and want to be able to park their car on a concrete pad closer to their house so they don’t have to walk across uneven ground to get to their house.
“There can be a wide variety of reasons for people to require concrete pads or sidewalk work outside of their house,” Moore comments. “Sometimes people or businesses just require additional parking space.”
Moore graduated from Blue Earth Area High School in 2013 and after attending Iowa Lakes Community College in Emmetsburg, Iowa, for two years to study construction management, he returned to his hometown to take over the business his father, Mark, had started in 1975.
“He started his construction business first and then started doing commercial snowplowing a couple of years later,” the younger Moore says of his father. “He pretty much retired in 2013 and sold some of his equipment. I restarted the business in 2015.”
Now Mark, his wife Josselyn and their two children, Jameson and Mylo, have settled nicely into the Blue Earth community.
“I always knew I wanted to do this kind of work,” Moore, the youngest of six kids, shares. “I was always on the job site with my dad learning how things were done.”
Moore does mostly concrete and flat work such as driveways and sidewalks.
“We also do foundation repair and straighten block walls,” he says. “We do some farm drainage work, including repairs, and we haul gravel and install gravel driveways.”
He notes they also do some demolition work.
“Sometimes we might have to take down a garage before pouring a foundation for where the new one is going to be built,” he says. “But, we have also taken down some small houses or other buildings on farms. We have, on occasion, done some tree removal.”
Moore reveals some of the most rewarding work he does is straightening basement walls in houses.
“There are a bunch of older basements in Blue Earth which were made out of block and the cores were not filled,” he explains. “The water pressure on the outside of the house can cause a basement wall to lean to the inside.”
What Moore likes about the technique he uses is that if it is an unfinished wall on the inside of the house, once the repair is made a person will not be able to tell the difference from the inside of the basement.
“It’s about a four-day process we use,” he says. “It depends if there is just one wall affected or if there are more that need work.”
Moore shares he has been very happy with a recent investment he made.
“We bought a wheeled excavator,” he comments. “We can drive it down the road at 22 miles per hour so we don’t have to spend time loading it and unloading it on a trailer. We got it to do tile repair. It makes going from job site to job site easier and we can get more jobs completed in a day. Plus, if we are on a residential site, the wheels don’t mess a lawn up like an excavator with tracks does.”
When the temperatures cool down, the winter weather hits and the outside construction season comes to an end, Moore and his three employees, Reed Krieger, Matt Heenan and Jovany Martinez stay busy cleaning snow from driveways.
“Most of our snow removal work is for commercial clients but we have some residential customers also,” Moore says. “We have four snow plows, two salt spreaders, two skid steer loaders, a payloader and a backhoe so we have many different options depending on what the job calls for.”
He reveals that after a bad snowstorm, snow removal may begin as early as 1 a.m. in the morning and continue for 22 hours straight.
“We try and take a little break and get a one to two hour nap before we get back to work again,” Moore explains. “Last winter kept us a little busier than some of the previous years.”
Moore informs his clients that the key to having a concrete driveway or pad is to start with a good base.
“Many of the sidewalks and garage pads we have replaced did not have a proper base,” Moore says. “It is important you start with a good base and make sure your design is appropriate for the application you intend on using it for. Doing things right from the beginning will extend the life of your finished product for a long, long time.”