LIVERMORE FALLS – Jessica Lovely checked on the smell of burning rubber Tuesday night, but didn’t find the source.

She had just finished doing laundry, and went back to talking with her boyfriend on a cell phone while sitting on the couch in a front room of the two-story house owned by her father and stepmother, John and Melissa Lovely at 96 Depot St.

“I looked up and saw a gray-white cloud of smoke and that’s when I knew” the house was on fire, Jessica Lovely, 21, said.

The smoke alarms on the first floor started going off and she yelled up to her father, who was upstairs in a bedroom watching television.

“I yelled ‘fire’ to my boyfriend,” she said, and hung-up.

She and her father saved what they could, some important documents and three dogs. A 4-month-old puppy, Fluffy, perished in the blaze, and a cat went missing until Wednesday morning.

“We found the cat,” stepmother Melissa Lovely said Wednesday, as the two stood outside the yellow taped-off area around the house.

She and her younger children, Xavier, 5, and Alektra, 14 months, were in Farmington at her mother’s house when the fire broke out about 10:16 p.m.

Lovely, the owner of Lovely Rentals, said she was doing computer work there and had been talking off and on to her husband. At 9:45 p.m. everything was fine, she said.

“Then all of a sudden at 10:22 he calls and says ‘come and get me; the house is on fire,’ ” she said.

Melissa and Jessica were waiting outside the house Wednesday to get in to see what could be salvaged, but couldn’t until state fire investigators inspected the burned area to determine the fire’s cause.

About 45 firefighters from Livermore Falls, Livermore and Jay responded to fight the blaze while Wilton Fire Department’s Rapid Intervention Team stood by at the scene in case they were needed, Livermore Falls fire Chief Ken Jones said Wednesday.

When he arrived on the scene, Jones said, flames were showing from the left side of the first floor in the rear of the house.

The fire started in a roughly 20-by-20-foot area that contained a laundry room, bathroom and a spare room, he said. That area was heavily damaged as well as the contents. An attached barn was not damaged, he said.

The remainder of the first floor and the second floor had heavy smoke damage and water damage, he said.

Firefighters were able to hook up to two hydrants on Depot Street and conducted an interior attack of the building and were able to knock most of the fire down in 20 to 30 minutes, Jones said.

Checking to make sure all of the fire spots were out took nearly three hours, he added.

The department was unable to use its new aerial truck because the road grade was too steep, power lines were in the way and there were items in the driveway, he said.

A representative from the family’s insurance company was on the scene Tuesday night.

He planned to meet with state fire investigators Wednesday to try to determine what caused the fire.

Melissa Lovely, who said the family has lived at the house for six years, said what bothered her most while her house was burning was a crowd of spectators who wouldn’t move back when she asked them to and who were taking pictures.

“I was extremely upset,” she said. “It was appalling.”