Past and present Coffey Strong presidents finally home more than 2 years after Tubbs fire

There were a couple of pesky correction notices, left by a city inspector, that Steve Rahmn still needed to take care of. Also, he needed to buy a TV for his new house.

Jeff Okrepkie needed doorstops for his new place.

Those minor issues aside, both men were beaming last week. After 855 and 856 ?days, respectively, out of their Coffey Park homes that burned in the Tubbs fire on Oct. 8, 2017, Rahmn, Okerepkie and their families moved into rebuilt Santa Rosa houses.

Okrepkie founded the neighborhood support group Coffey Strong, and was its first president. Rahmn is now president. Despite their high profiles in the community, neither was in the early, or even middle waves, of residents returning to Coffey Park, where nearly 800 of the 1,440 homes destroyed by the inferno have been rebuilt, according to figures released by the city. Okrepkie and Rahmn were fine with that.

Being patient, “taking your time and hiring the right contractor” is one of the most important elements of the rebuilding process, Rahmn said. “The relationship you have with your builder is like a marriage.”

Rahmn and his wife, Michele’s ?“marriage” with Windsor-based Snyder Construction was strong. Two days after moving in, Steve Rahmn called Olin Cohan, the company’s director of operations, “just ’cause I hadn’t heard his voice” in a while.

Jeff and Stephanie Okrepkie were renters in the Espresso Court house that burned. While they desperately wanted to return to Coffey Park, the couple was having trouble making the finances work. Finally, he persuaded APM Homes, which specializes in tract homes, to work with him on a customized build, also on Espresso Court, three houses from their old place.

But the sometimes maddeningly slow process endured by the Okrepkies had a distinct upside, he said. The more time it took, the more people he was meeting - homeowners and contractors - and the more he was learning about pitfalls to avoid.

“Kismet, serendipity - whatever you want to call it,” Okrepkie said. “The delay in figuring out what we were going to do ended up benefiting us.”

Rahmn felt happiness, rather than resentment, when neighbors moved in before he did. “I never felt jealousy,” he said. “If I had a low moment, I threw myself into Coffey Strong, or my work.”

Like other Coffey Strong board members, he and Rahmn have devoted hundreds of hours to helping their friends and neighbors get back home. Those were hours they weren’t necessarily spending on their own rebuilding projects.

Being back in his Waring Court house, Rahmn said, feels like a weight has been lifted.

After putting, on average, 40 hours a week into their rebuild, “There’s definitely a big sigh. All the sudden you can stop and smell the roses. Our lives are no longer on hold,” he said.

Moving day couldn’t come soon enough for the Okrepkies, whose 38-year-old, 1,100-square-foot rental home, a half-mile away in Coffey Park, seemed to shrink by the week. The couple has a 4-year-old son, a 20-month-old daughter and an 80-pound black lab mix.

His disagreements with his wife in that house were not fights, Okrepkie said, as much as they were a kind of coping mechanism, a venting of steam.

“It’s not that we’re angry people. We know how blessed we are. We were just so angry with our place in the world, right then and there,” he said. “We just wanted to get into this house.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88