There are still some stray bits and pieces scattered around the shop, but Steed and Evans Limited settled into its new Heidelberg headquarters with barely a hitch on Dec. 1.
The construction company was forced to move out of Kitchener when its landlord decided he wanted to develop the property in which its headquarters sat. Steed and Evans had been slowly outgrowing the Kitchener space for years, and that was the push it needed to make the move.
“Our old office was built sometime in the 1950s,” said company president Malcolm Matheson. “We were really crowded in the old office, and we needed more shop space.”
Steed and Evans was founded in 1953 by Roy Steed and Denis Evans in Maple, Ontario. The company moved into Kitchener in 1973 with the acquisition of Blacktop Construction. At the same time, Steed and Evans acquired aggregate reserves, a crushing plant and an asphalt plant in Heidelberg.
Matheson and his partners, Brian Barrett and Walter Nudyk, bought the materials and construction business in 2002, but not the Kitchener properties.
“He wants to develop that area, so we had to get out,” Matheson said.
The new headquarters sit on a seven-acre parcel of the 250-acre Heidelberg property, at the corner of Ament Line and Hawkesville Road. The 7,000-square-foot office building, 12,000-square-foot shop and storage yard cost upward of $3 million to build, Matheson said.
Steed and Evans hired a professional mover to relocate the office, but moved the contents of the shop itself.
Steed and Evans is a heavy construction company, specializing in road construction from sewer and watermain installation to asphalt paving. The company also holds large snow removal contracts in the region and Toronto area, and when the construction season ends, its fleet of 200 vehicles is refitted for snow removal.
Repairing and maintaining those vehicles is done in the new shop, which is both bigger and better-designed.
The old shop was long and narrow and only had doors in one end. The new shop is 60 per cent larger, has an overhead crane and several doors on each side, making it possible to drive equipment right through.
The two-storey office building houses payroll, administration and senior staff, and has space for a conference room and training facility.
The building is separated from the asphalt and gravel plants by an earthen berm, and the company plans to plant more screening trees, Matheson said.
