Trang Nguyen and Nhung Phan spent Monday inside their home at 2218 Dudley St., looking for things they could save.

They didn’t find much — a hat, a clock, some clothes that smelled like smoke from the fire that drove them and their four children from their home early the morning before.

They’ve already begun to start over, said their oldest child, daughter Tram Nguyen.

They went to Wal-mart Monday and bought clothes and kitchen things, Tram said.  They’re staying at the hotel where her mom works — the Staybridge Suites — until they can find another place to live.

But what’s gone doesn’t seem like so much, given what they almost lost.

Tram’s father, Trang Nguyen, was the first to notice the fire, which started in his bedroom very early Sunday.

He ran upstairs to wake up his family, and everyone ran outside.

Only one didn’t. They youngest, a 5-year-old boy, was still upstairs, Tram said. 

Her dad ran back inside. It was dark and smoky and he couldn’t see, but he found his youngest son and got back outside to safety, just as the firetrucks arrived, at 12:34 a.m. Sunday, she said. 

Often, stories like that one don’t have happy endings, said Bruce Sellon, a deputy fire chief with the Lincoln Fire Department.

Most people who re-enter burning buildings don’t get back out, he said.

“There’s just too many statistics against folks when they do that,” he said.

But no one in the family was seriously injured, he said. No one even had to be taken to the hospital.

By Monday afternoon, investigators had linked the fire to a space heater in Trang Nguyen’s bedroom, Sellon said.

Tram and her three brothers, who are 14, 11 and 5, stayed home from school Monday. They spent much of the day inside the burned home, where a partially melted big-screen TV, two leather couches, a coffee table and fish tank still sat inside the living room. 

The family had lived in the home for seven or eight years — about half of the time her parents have been in Lincoln since moving from Vietnam, Tram said. They rented the home, but even so had replaced the floors, painted the walls and converted part of the attic into a bathroom.

“It was a nice house,” she said. “We put a lot of work into it.”

The family plans to stay in Lincoln, she said. Her mom, especially, likes the community because it is quiet. Her father is unemployed.

Some of her parents’ friends have pitched in to give them things that they need, she said. And they’ll clean up some of the things from the charred house on Dudley Street.

The first thing they need is a new place to live.

“We need cheap rent,” Tram said. “That’s the main thing.”

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.