A family of three was displaced from its home when flames destroyed much of the residence on Thursday afternoon.

Robert and Lisa Taylor and their 8-year-old daughter were unsure about their plans as they stood in a neighbor’s yard at 4:30 p.m., watching firefighters knock down hot spots in the roof of their two-story home in the 1200 block of Woods Edge Circle.

“Right now, I’m just grateful that my family is OK,” Robert Taylor said, glancing at his wife and daughter as they talked with an investigator from Suffolk Fire and Rescue.

“Everybody got out,” Lisa Taylor said later. “The lives got out.”

Suffolk firefighters were simultaneously engaged in battling the Taylor house fire and a brush fire on Holy Neck Road during the same span of time on Thursday, according to Debbie George, a city spokesperson.

The brush fire was brought under control at 4:20 p.m., she stated in a press release.

Along Woods Edge Circle, neighbors home from school and work were gathered in front yards, watching as firefighters worked to bring the house fire under control. The largest group was gathered in the yard of the home across the street from the Taylors’ home, and friends hugged the couple as they watched.

Lisa Taylor said she and her daughter had been in the bedrooms upstairs when they heard smoke alarms sound inside the house. She ran downstairs and into the kitchen looking for a fire, she said, and when she turned back around she saw the flames on the front porch through a window.

Both she and her daughter were able to escape out the back patio door, she said.

The family had moved into the home in December 2008 from the Saratoga section of the city in what they had considered a move up, she said.

“Now, we can’t go nowhere but up from here,” she added.

A Disaster Action Team member from the Suffolk Chapter of the American Red Cross was on the way to the scene to provide assistance around 5 p.m., Red Cross officials announced in an email.

The cause of the fire was still under investigation at that time.