Mother Builds Her Own Home Using YouTube Tutorials
Mother Builds Her Own Home Using YouTube Tutorials
CBS News- Mother of four, Cara Brookins, took it upon herself to get her and her kids out of an abusive situation. During that time her children were 17, 15, 11 and 2. She and her children felt powerless to stop the domestic abuse that was going on in their home. Brookens was married to a man who “descended into full-blown paranoid schizophrenia.” she said. Even after their divorce, he continued to frighten the family. “During that period, I remarried to a man who I thought was strong enough to handle it,” she told CBS News. “But I was wrong and he turned out to be a very violent man.”
A Moment of Clarity
There came a moment when Brookins and her children left their painful situation. She says, “So, I just always thought that, no matter how bad it was, maybe I could make it better. Maybe I can fix this. But eventually, I realized there’s no way that I can ever make this situation better. It was the realization that maybe if the kids and I are out of here, then we have a shot.” During that time she didn’t have enough funds to buy a home she and her family can live in comfortably. They eventually moved into a tiny home outside Little Rock, Arkansas. It wasn’t long that she had an epiphany. “I had rented this cabin for a Thanksgiving getaway,” she tells CBS News. “And driving there, we passed this house that had been ravaged by a tornado. It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open. You don’t often get the opportunity to see the interior workings of a house, but looking at these 2x4s and these nails, it just looked so simple. I thought, ‘I could put this wall back up if I really tried. Maybe I should just start from scratch.’”
Brookins had just enough money to purchase supplies and one acre of land. There was no turning back, no funds to hire help, and nowhere to go but up. “Once I had bought all these supplies and they were all piled up, there was no way out,” Brookins explains. “There wasn’t enough money to pay anyone to put them together. There was no plan B.” There was no doubt that they were faced with an overwhelming task, but the family turned to an unlikely source that turned out to be their saving grace: YouTube. While the popular video-sharing website at that time, in 2008, wasn’t what it is today, the family managed to build an entire home with rooms for each of the children.
It was all hands on deck. “They were all in,” Brookins tells CBS News proudly of her kids. “My biggest fear was that my teenagers would wake up and say, ‘No, I’m not doing this.’ And it never happened. It was the first time they had felt any sort of power, any sort of control over their lives. And they knew how much they needed it.” It took the family nine months, including long nights, to build a home where they can feel safe. They all came together to rebuild their family and lives while finding the strength to move on. Brookin even has a book coming out “Rise, How A House Built A Family.” She also had a few words for women who feel powerless and paralyzed by domestic violence. “Forget everything you’ve been told about taking baby steps. Everybody says, ‘If you just take a small step every day, it will get better.’ In my experience, though, it doesn’t. You have to make a big leap. It has to be this huge, enormous act. For us, it was building a house. For somebody else, it could be something totally different. But you need to do something big that changes your perception of yourself.”
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