Single Mother Of Four Builds House From Scratch By Watching YouTube Tutorials

Apr 08, 2020

After two bad marriages, Cara Brookins and her four young children moved out of the house into a smaller, more affordable home — much too small for the entire family — in Little Rock, Arkansas to get away from the toxic relationships. Struggling to house her large family as a single mother, Brookins came up with an unconventional solution shortly thereafter. With the help of tutorials on YouTube, Brookins and her children built a new home from scratch.

Brookins came up with her ambitious plan after renting a Thanksgiving getaway cabin. On the way to the cabin, Brookins and her kids — aged 17, 15, 11 and 2 at the time — came upon the wreckage of a house that had been destroyed by a tornado.

“It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open,” Brookins told CBS News. “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.’”

Following the Brookins’ epiphany, the mother of four checked her finances and discovered that she had just enough money to not only buy the construction supplies, but also to buy an acre of land for their new home. Once she had purchased the raw materials and the land, however, Brookins didn’t have any money leftover to afford outside help — so the burden of building a new house from scratch fell on Brookins and her four children. As Brookins told CBS News, “There was no Plan B.” 

While some of us certainly consult YouTube to figure out how to fix a dishwasher or — for the hopelessly inept among us — how to replace a lightbulb, building a house from scratch based on videos seems next to impossible, especially for a family without professional construction experience. But as Brookins said, her family didn’t really have any other choice.

“This was 2008, so YouTube was not then what it is now. There weren’t really comprehensive videos or channels devoted to this sort of thing,” she said in an interview with CBS News. “But there’s a lot of ways to frame a window or to put a foundation together. So, we would watch three or four videos for each stage of construction and then think, ‘Which one of these is going to work the best for us?’”

So her entire family — save, of course, for the two year old — got to work to help their mother, a computer analyst, build the home of their dreams without any previous experience. One child marked, another ran the nail gun and someone watched over the two year old while the rest of the family worked. But Brookins doesn’t mince words when she describes the project — it wasn't easy.

“It hurt,” Brookins told CBS News. “It was not something that was a great match to us physically, but my kids got up every day and they came out here. I was working all day and they were in school, and we would work into the night sometimes by headlights. It was incredibly intense. There was nobody going to the movies. There were no dates, no hanging out. It was all hands on deck.”

But eventually, it got done. And now Brookins and her four children not only have a safe home that’s big enough for all of them, but they also have the experience of coming together as a family to take on what seemed impossible. Documenting her family’s unbelievable accomplishment, Brookings even published a book detailing the process back in 2017.

When asked if Brookins had advice for others who are going through trying circumstances, she told CBS News to ignore the “baby steps” cliche when it comes to changing your life. “Everybody says, ‘If you just take a small step every day, it will get better.’ In my experience, though, it doesn’t,” she told CBS News. “You have to make a big leap. It has to be this huge, enormous act.”

Would you have been able to build a home from scratch to save your family? How do you think Cara managed to do it? Let us know and make sure to pass Brookins' incredible story on to friends and family members.