Excavation Contractor — Mattoon, IL

Yard Grading, Land Grading & Site Work in Mattoon

If you searched yard grading contractor in Mattoon, IL or land grading near Mattoon, this is the crew and the shop is on U.S. 45 here in town. Yard grading in Mattoon is usually one of three jobs: the ground falls back toward the house instead of away from it, a low spot holds water for days after a rain, or a yard got torn up by a build and needs putting back to a grade that mows. Land grading on the acreage side is the bigger version — a lot pushed to fall the right way, a lane crowned so it sheds, a building pad brought to elevation. Same D6N and the same operator either way.

Brohez Trucking LLC is based in Mattoon, IL — Coles County, central Illinois. The shop, the equipment, and the dump trucks are all here. When you call (217) 809-0779, you're calling Mattoon — Levi answers.

We handle excavation, demolition, rock driveways, dirt hauling, pond work, drainage, foundations, and site prep for Mattoon homeowners, contractors, farmers, and businesses. Same-day response is normal in town — emergency culvert washouts, drainage that needs fixed before the next rain, demo work on a tight schedule.

If it's in Mattoon, we're not "coming in from out of town." We're already here.

Looking for a yard grading contractor in Mattoon, IL?

That's the call we take most often in town, and it usually comes after a wet spring. Water standing along a foundation, a back yard that stays soft a week after everyone else's has dried, a low corner that won't grow anything. Most of the time the ground is doing exactly what it was shaped to do — it just wasn't shaped to send water anywhere.

A yard grading contractor fixes that by moving dirt, not by adding pipe: strip and stockpile the topsoil, cut the high side, fill the low side, and re-establish a fall that carries water away from the house and out to somewhere it's allowed to go. On bigger ground the same work is called land grading — pasture, acreage, a build site before anything gets poured. Same dozer, same laser grade control, same crew.

Mattoon is flat, and flat is the hard case: a fraction of a percent of slope is the difference between water moving and water sitting, which is why we run grade control instead of eyeballing passes. The full scope, equipment and process live on our grading page. If the surface turns out not to be the problem, that's drainage — and we'll tell you which one you've got at the free on-site walk rather than selling you the one we showed up with.

Demolition Contractor in Mattoon, IL

Brohez Trucking is a Mattoon-based demolition contractor — the shop, the excavator, the dozer, and the dump trucks are all here in town. That means Mattoon teardowns get the shortest mobilization and the shortest debris haul of anywhere we work. Houses, detached garages, sheds, mobile homes, barns, grain bins, foundations, and slabs.

In-town Mattoon lots need a plan for the alley, the neighbors, and the utility disconnects; farm ground out in Coles County needs a plan for the haul road. We handle both. See house demolition, garage demolition, barn demolition, or every demolition service we offer. Call (217) 809-0779 for a free on-site estimate.

Culvert Repair & Replacement in Mattoon, IL

A rusted-out or crushed entrance pipe is one of the most common calls we get close to the shop. Culvert repair in Mattoon is usually same-week work — the machines, the crew and the shop are all in town, so there is no travel to price in and no waiting on somebody to come down from Champaign.

You can usually tell from the road which one you have. Water standing on the uphill side of the drive after the rest of the ditch has drained means the pipe is plugged or the flowline has silted shut. A dip or a soft spot in the driveway directly over the pipe means corrugated metal has rusted through the bottom and the drive is falling into it. Ends mashed flat mean the pipe was undersized for what has been driving over it.

What the job actually is: pull the old pipe, re-cut the flowline so the new one sits on the ditch grade instead of above it, set pipe sized to the ditch rather than to whatever came out, backfill in compacted lifts so the driveway doesn’t settle over it a second time, and shape the ends back so the ditch still mows. We run both corrugated metal and smooth-wall plastic and will tell you which one belongs in your ditch — the depth of cover over the pipe and the grade of the ditch decide that, not preference.

Straight about the paperwork: a driveway culvert sits in the road right-of-way, not on your own ground, so the township, the county or IDOT has to permit it. We’ll tell you which authority owns your road before anything comes out. Who to ask for a driveway culvert permit in Illinois →

Washouts get priority. If a culvert lets go and takes the end of the driveway with it, call — same-day response in town is normal, and we’d rather work the emergency than turn it down. Full detail on our culvert repair and replacement page. Free on-site estimate — (217) 809-0779.

Who Is Responsible For A Driveway Culvert In Mattoon, IL?

In almost every case around Coles County, the culvert under your driveway is yours. The road authority — the township road district, the county highway department, or IDOT, depending on whose road your entrance meets — owns the ditch and sets the rules: what size pipe, what material, how much cover, what the ends look like, and whether you need a permit. But the pipe itself exists to get you across their ditch, so buying it, installing it to their spec, keeping it clear and replacing it when it fails normally falls to the property owner. If a plugged or collapsed driveway culvert is backing water up the ditch onto the road, the road authority can and does tell the owner to fix it.

There are local exceptions worth one phone call before you assume. Some township road districts will set a pipe, or supply it, or run their own backhoe on it as a courtesy for a resident — that is a local practice, not a rule, and it varies from one township to the next inside Coles County. It is also worth asking whether the entrance is grandfathered or whether a replacement re-opens the permit. One call to the road office that has jurisdiction answers all of it, and it is free.

Who do I call before replacing a culvert in Mattoon?

Whoever has jurisdiction over the road your driveway meets — and that is decided by the road, not by your address. A township road is the township road district and its highway commissioner. A county highway is the county highway department or county engineer. A US or Illinois route is IDOT, and that permit has to be in hand before anything is dug. A city street inside Mattoon is the city. If you do not know which one your entrance meets, the county highway department can usually tell you in one call. We walk that with you at the estimate rather than finding out afterwards — the Illinois driveway culvert permit page lays out all four.

Does my culvert need replacing, or just cleaning out?

Cleaning is the answer more often than people expect, and it is much the cheaper job. If the pipe is silted in, root-choked, or its outlet disappeared under years of ditch growth, the pipe is usually still fine and the water just has nowhere to go. Replacement is the call when the invert — the bottom of the pipe — is rusted through, when the pipe is crushed or out of round, when the ends have washed out and the shoulder is falling in beside it, or when it was undersized for what actually comes down the ditch. The tell most owners see first is a soft spot or a sinkhole in the drive over the line: that is fill washing into a hole in the pipe, and no amount of cleaning fixes it.

Free on-site look either way — (217) 809-0779, or read the full culvert repair and installation page.

Drain Tile & Field Tile Repair in Mattoon, IL

Mattoon is home base, so drain tile repair here is same-week work for us more often than not. The heavy Illinoian till that makes this good pond ground is the same clay that makes tile mandatory — water doesn't go anywhere on its own in Coles County, so when a line quits, the wet spot shows up fast and it doesn't dry out on its own.

Most of what we dig up around Mattoon is one of three things: century-old clay tile that's finally collapsed, HDPE crushed by equipment that's a lot heavier than what was rolling over it when it went in, or an outlet that got buried during a fence-row push-out or cut off by a ditch cleaning. In town it's usually a yard line or a footing drain that's plugged; out on the Coles County ground it's a field main. Either way the job is the same — find the failure, dig it, splice or replace, tie it back to the main at the right fall.

We're repair and targeted lines only — we don't run fresh pattern tile across a field, and we'll tell you straight if that's what you actually need. See drain tile repair in Mattoon for how the work goes, or yard drainage in Mattoon if the water is on the surface. Free on-site look — (217) 809-0779.

Trenching in Mattoon, IL

This is home. The shop is in Mattoon, so trenching in Mattoon, IL is usually same-week work — no travel to price in and no waiting on a crew to come down from somewhere else.

A trench is only as good as its slope. Anybody can open a ditch with a bucket; the job is putting the bottom of that trench on continuous fall from the high end to a real outlet, so water leaves and keeps leaving. On Coles County's flat ground that fall is measured in inches, which is why we shoot it instead of eyeballing it.

What we trench around Mattoon: yard drain and downspout runs at the house, French drain trenches around a foundation, culvert lines under a driveway, sump discharge runs, water service and yard-hydrant lines below frost, and tile lines out on the farm ground north and east of town. The JCB 8040ZTS mini fits the in-town lots off Western and Richmond without wrecking a yard; the Komatsu PC150LC-6 handles the deep and the long.

Straight about the edges: we open, bed and backfill the trench and your licensed electrician or plumber makes the connection — no fiber, telecom, or electrical distribution work. On tile we run targeted lines and repairs, not full pattern-tile installs. Full detail on our trenching service page. Free on-site estimate — (217) 809-0779.

Land Clearing in Mattoon, IL

Land clearing in Mattoon, IL is the job we get asked about most around this town — overgrown fence rows, a timbered corner somebody wants back in production, a lot that has not been touched in twenty years.

Clearing is not one job, and what it costs turns on which of these it is. Brush and scrub — multiflora rose, honeysuckle, volunteer locust along a fence line — comes out fast and the ground is usable straight away. Fence rows are their own animal: there is old woven wire, posts, and usually a berm of dirt the row has collected for decades, and all three have to come out or the line will not farm. Standing timber means stumps, and stumps are the part people underestimate — a tree you can push over in a minute leaves a root ball that takes considerably longer. A grown-over lot in town is the awkward one, because there is no room to windrow and everything has to leave on a truck.

How it runs: we walk it with you and mark what stays. The dozer pushes and piles, the excavator takes the stumps and the root balls, and the piles either burn where that is permitted or get loaded out. Then the ground gets levelled, the holes get filled, and it gets seeded if you want it seeded. What you have at the end is ground you can mow, farm or build on — not a field of craters with a burn scar in the middle.

Two straight answers before you ask. Clearing is priced as work, start to finish — the trees that come out are disposal, not payment. And a burn needs whatever permission your jurisdiction requires; outside city limits that is usually straightforward, inside Mattoon it often is not, and that changes whether the piles leave on a truck. Full scope on our land clearing and fence row clearing pages. Free on-site walk — (217) 809-0779.

Pond & Lake Construction in Mattoon, IL

Mattoon is home base — we're on US-45 just north of town — so pond work here is the shortest haul we make and the ground we know best. Coles County sits on heavy Illinoian till: dense clay a couple of feet down that holds water about as well as anything in the state. That's the good news. The catch is relief. Most of the ground around Mattoon is flat to gently rolling, so a pond here is usually a basin cut and shaped with the spoil built into a low dam and bank, not a big dam thrown across a valley. Watersheds are small, so we size the inlet and the pond together — a pond with too little ground feeding it sits low all summer.

Looking for a pond builder or pond digger near Mattoon?

You're already in the right town. The shop is in Mattoon, the machines sleep here, and a pond job on the north or east side of town is a drive-out, not a mobilization across the state. That matters more on pond work than on most jobs, because a pond is not a one-trip build — we come back to check the fill after the first real rain, and being twenty minutes away is the difference between that happening and it not. The iron that builds a Mattoon pond is the Komatsu PC150LC-6 for the basin and the core trench, the Cat D6N for pushing spoil and shaping bank, and our own tandems if any dirt has to leave. One crew, one number, no coordinating three outfits.

What the ground actually does around Mattoon

Most of Coles County is honest pond ground, but it is not uniform, and the places it changes are predictable. The till holds tight across the tablelands — that's the dirt that seals a basin on its own and keys a dam without anything trucked in. Get into a draw running off toward the Kaskaskia northwest of town or the Embarras east of it and the picture can change inside a hundred feet: a sand seam or a gravel lens two feet down that will quietly take your water out the bottom no matter how good the clay above it looked. That's why we dig test pits before we stake anything on a site with any slope to it. A test pit costs an hour; finding the seam after the basin is cut costs a great deal more than that.

The other Mattoon-specific thing to read before a shovel moves is tile. This ground is tiled, and a lot of it was tiled before anybody kept a map. A line crossing the pond footprint has to be found and carried around the basin — not into it. A tile discharging under the waterline is a slow leak with a clay bottom that gets blamed for it, and a tile cut and abandoned in a dam is a hole through the one part of the job that cannot have one.

Can I just dig a hole for a pond?

Around here, no — and this is the question we get asked most often, usually after somebody has watched a hole fill up in April and go empty by August. A hole holds water in Coles County only if two separate things are true. The bottom and the wetted face have to be dense enough to stop water, which means the clay gets scarified, moisture-conditioned and recompacted as the basin is shaped, not just dug and left rough. And enough ground has to drain to it to replace what evaporates off an open pool through a Mattoon summer. Get the first right and miss the second and you own a very well-built dry hole. Every pond we build here is clay-lined and runoff-fed, sized to the watershed above it, with a keyed core, a shaped emergency spillway set to elevation, and banks seeded before we leave.

When a Mattoon pond is really a lake

Past about two acres of water the job stops being a basin with a bank around it and becomes a dam with a pool behind it, and the dam is then the whole job — sizing, keying, lift-by-lift compaction, and a spillway built for the storm the watershed above it can deliver, not for a nice day. Landowners south and west of Mattoon with a real draw to work with are the ones this comes up for. If that is what you are looking at, read lake construction rather than the pond pages, because the engineering conversation is different.

Where to go next: how a Brohez pond gets built for the whole method, pond excavation and digging for the dig itself, pond dam construction if a dam is the job, or what a pond costs to build for what actually moves a number. Already own one? Pond dam & spillway repair if it is losing level or the overflow has cut back into the dam, and pond cleanout if it has gone shallow and weedy and you want the depth back. Free on-site walk anywhere around Mattoon — (217) 809-0779.

The Local Choice

• Mattoon-based. The shop is here. No drive-in markup, no out-of-town crew that doesn't know your street.
• Same-day response in town. Emergency washouts, drainage before storms, fast demo turnarounds — we can usually be there.
• Real equipment. Komatsu PC150LC-6, JCB 8040ZTS mini, Takeuchi TL150, Cat 259D3, Cat D6N dozer, Volvo and Ford tandem dump trucks.
• 5-star rated on Google.
• Free on-site estimates with straight numbers.
• Fully insured — full liability and equipment coverage. Certificate of insurance on request.
• Open Monday–Saturday, 7am to 7pm.

Working Around Mattoon

Mattoon sits in Coles County, central Illinois — about 17,000 people, on the I-57 corridor halfway between Champaign and Effingham, and home to Lake Land College. We work all over town: the older neighborhoods on the north and west sides around Peterson Park, the newer subdivisions, the commercial strip on Route 16 and Broadway by Cross County Mall, the industrial zone on the south end, and the rural ground out toward Cooks Mills, Humboldt, and Lake Mattoon.

Sub-areas we cover too: Cooks Mills, Humboldt, Lake Mattoon, Lerna, the rural Coles County roads, and right into Charleston (12 miles east). If you're in Coles County, we're in your area.

Common Mattoon jobs: Foundation digs and basement excavation for new builds, drainage tile fixes for the older neighborhoods with original clay tile, rock driveway installs and refresh on rural lanes, demo on small commercial buildings and houses, pond cleanouts on Lake Mattoon and farm ponds out in the county, and the everyday culvert and drainage work that small-town life turns up. Close to the shop we do a steady amount of culvert replacement — rusted-out and crushed entrance pipe pulled, flowline re-cut, new pipe sized to the ditch.

Recent Mattoon jobs: a backyard in-ground pool excavation and yard regrade, a 42-ton crushed-rock driveway, several tandem loads of fill dirt hauled and placed, and CA-7 driveway rock delivered and spread — all in and around Mattoon over the past few weeks.

Emergency response: If a culvert washes out, a tile breaks, or you've got water where you can't have it — call. Same-day response in town is normal. We'd rather work the emergency than turn it down.

Worth a read first: how to find a broken field tile, how a wet basement gets fixed from the outside, and what time of year is best for yard drainage tile.

Mattoon, IL FAQs

5★ on Google

Read all 21 reviews →

Where Mattoon Sits

Mattoon, IL is roughly the center of our 60-mile service radius. We work Mattoon and the surrounding county regularly.

Got A Job In Mattoon?

Call us and we'll come look. No pressure, no obligation — just a straight number.

When you call, you talk to Levi — the man running the machine, not a salesman.

Hours: Monday–Saturday, 7am–7pm · Mattoon, IL · Coles County