First Fountaingrove home rising after fires

The first home being rebuilt in Fountaingrove reached a milestone recently when framers began roughing in the walls of Ed and Kathy Hamilton’s Shillingford Place home.|

The rumble of excavators and backhoes clearing fire debris in Fountaingrove is slowly being replaced by the sharp buzz of circular saws ripping lumber and the satisfying thwack of framing hammers smacking boards into place.

While nearby abandoned lots go up for sale in the wake of the Tubbs fire, residents of this hillside Santa Rosa neighborhood who are undaunted by weather delays, permitting headaches and insurance haggling are beginning to see signs of progress.

Foundations are finally being poured and, for the first time, walls are going up in this fire zone where 1,420 homes were destroyed in October.

“We were the last to burn and the first to rebuild,” said Ed Hamilton, standing on the slab of concrete he and his wife, Kathy, hope to call home again soon. “We’re just very happy to be where we are in the process.”

While it has been more than two months since the first homes started going up in Coffey Park, Fountaingrove’s recovery has been slower. Of the 119 homes in the city that have started the permitting process, 56 have been approved, with 25 of those under construction, according to city permit data.

Only about a quarter of those under construction are in the Fountaingrove area.

Several factors have been cited for the more sluggish pace of the neighborhood’s recovery.

The homes in Fountaingrove and Skyfarm are larger, taking more time to redesign. Many are on sloped lots, which take more effort to clear and regrade. Questions also linger about the area’s water system, parts of which have been contaminated with benzene. And many residents are older, often making them less willing or able to endure the rebuilding process.

The Hamiltons have persevered. They’ve relied on a formidable mix of determination, strong financial resources, friends with valuable skills and a positive outlook.

“You can’t look back. You’ve got to look forward,” Ed Hamilton said.

The Hamiltons figure their two-story home on Shillingford Place was the last home in the neighborhood to burn because of the email they received from their alarm company. The email alerted them at 9:46 a.m. on Oct. 9 that the smoke detectors in their home had gone off, hours after the Tubbs fire had already turned large swaths of the area into a smoldering wasteland.

But even after the howling winds quieted, the inferno remained untamed, flaring up unexpectedly. The couple suspect flames crept their way up the hill and ignited landscaping around their home and two others at the end of Shillingford that also burned.

They later learned that a sheriff’s deputy was able to use their garden hose, after their house was beyond saving, to douse the flames on a neighbor’s home, shielding it and very likely several others on the street.

The Hamiltons, who own Tekberry, a successful local staffing business, briefly considered forgoing the rebuilding heartache. If their site, like so many others, had been “in the middle of a war zone,” Ed Hamilton, 67, said, they may very well have chosen to retire and start over someplace else, like Carlsbad.

But because most of the homes surrounding theirs survived - their property is at the southern edge of the Tubbs burn zone - their street retained enough of a neighborhood feel to make them decide to rebuild, the couple said.

Once that decision was made, they didn’t delay.

Their friend Danny Lamar, a foreman with their framing contractor, RHI, urged them to move quickly to avoid soaring material costs and labor shortages that are already proving challenging for fire survivors who want to rebuild.

“I told him, ‘You have to be the first guy,’?” Lamar recalled. “General contractors are not the problem. There’s not going to be enough subs to do all the work.”

They also chose to have a private contractor clean their lot, instead of working with the Army Corps of Engineers, which focused much of its early work in Coffey Park and wasn’t able to guarantee when it would get to any particular home site.

To date the federal agency says it has overseen the removal of 1.4 million tons of debris in Sonoma County alone.

The Hamiltons didn’t hesitate to hire professionals to get crucial work completed quickly, either, like hiring an out-of-area engineer to complete their home plans when local firms got jammed up.

The firm they hired ended up being one whose work was well ?regarded by the outsourced plan checkers staffing the city’s dedicated rebuilding department, which approved the drawings after two brief meetings in December.

“A professional presentation makes a big difference,” Lamar said.

Robust insurance coverage doesn’t hurt either. Ed Hamilton said he insisted when he purchased the home during the slump in 2011 that it be better insured than the broker proposed, and it was worthwhile. Excluding contents, their insurer already has paid out nearly $1.9 million. Their total rebuild, they think, is going to cost nearly that amount.

Their insurer is covering the $11,000 per month rent for them to stay in a home in Bennett Valley, a house they only landed after an “insane” period of bidding wars erupted between insurers over available comparable rental homes, he said.

If all goes well they hope to have the home’s structure in place by June, with the interior work completed a year later. Kathy Hamilton has been keeping others informed of their progress, blogging about it at Tubbsfire-our-rebuild.com.

Ed Hamilton compared losing everything in the fire to a debilitating disease, like “physical Alzheimer’s - your physical life is just ripped away from you.”

But seeing the walls go up has allowed some healing to begin, Kathy Hamilton said.

“Emotionally, it just makes a huge difference,” she said.

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