She couldn’t stop herself from crying Monday as she walked through her charred and smoke-damaged home in East Lawrence.

Onechanh Rattanavongsy, a single mother of three, didn’t just live in the home at 1809 Atherton Court. She helped build it in 2002 through Habitat for Humanity, an agency that provides homes for low-income families.

“I hit a lottery when I got this house,” she said. “This house is everything to me and my kids.”

On Monday, insurance investigators were combing through the home. Rattanavongsy and her children – Austin, 9, Timothy, 5, and Destiny, 4 – were back where they started: staying at a trailer with one of her sisters.

The fire started Sunday afternoon and was caused by a clogged dryer vent, Douglas County Fire & Medical officials said.

Rattanavongsy said she left the dryer running near the end of its cycle and took her kids out to eat. A short time later, her sister called to tell her a neighbor had reported seeing the fire.

Most of the ceilings and walls inside the home were either burned or colored black from smoke on Monday, and the only existing photo of Rattanavongsy’s deceased father had been burned off the wall, she said.

Onechanh Rattanavongsy looks over the damage to her home at 1809 Atherton Court from a Sunday fire. The house is a Habitat for Humanity home occupied by Rattanavongsy and her three children.

Fire officials initially estimated the damage at $30,000, but Rattanavongsy said she’d been told it was somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000. One consolation for the family is that the home is fully insured.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” she said. “I still can’t think.”

The home was built by a group of women volunteers that included Deanell Tacha, chief judge of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; state legislator Barbara Ballard and then-state legislator Sandy Praeger; and Kansas University basketball legend Lynette Woodard.

• 6News video: Habitat for Humanity house catches fire

This is the first time fire has caused significant damage to one of the 58 homes in Lawrence built by Habitat for Humanity, executive director Jean Lilley said.

Lilley said the agency was sending letters Monday to all of its homeowners reminding them to regularly clean their dryer vents. Both she and Fire Marshal Rich Barr said the fire was unrelated to the work done by Habitat’s building crews.

A wall of photographs, including the only existing photo of Rattanavongsy's father, was destroyed in the fire.

Barr said homeowners should check their dryer vents periodically to make sure air is blowing out when the dryer is on. But one catch is that the type of vent Barr said is most likely to accumulate lint – one that runs vertically and exists through the roof, like Rattanavongsy’s – is the more difficult kind to monitor.

“You don’t envision a lot of people crawling onto the roof just to check if air is coming out of the dryer vent,” he said.

Habitat for Humanity, at 832-0777, is accepting donations for people wanting to help the Rattanavongsy family.