THE HOUSE THAT LOVE BUILT
After her third divorce, an Arkansas mom and her kids rebuilt their lives one DIY video at a time
Meet amazing single mom Cara Brookins, who built her own house using Youtube videos!
Cara Brookins needed a fresh start. Living with her four children in the house she had shared with her ex-husband, the desperate mom decided to raid her life savings to buy a $20,000 plot of land and applied for a $150,000 new construction loan. Though she didn’t know the first thing about building a home, she was determined to make it work. “I’d signed all of these loan papers and the bank gave me nine months to build a house,” she tells In Touch, “but I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do it for us.” So she turned to an unexpected source: online tutorials. “We watched a whole bunch of Youtube videos,” explains Cara, whose kids were 2, 11, 15 and 17 in 2008 when they started building the 3,500-square-foot, five-bedroom sanctuary in Bryant, Ark. “I thought, ‘I have no idea how to do this, but I can watch how to sort one foundation block and then do that 1,500 times,’” says the 45-year-old computer programmer-turned-writer, who released a book about the experience called Rise: How a House Built a Family in January. “I know how to cut a piece of wood and pound in a nail — I just have to find the Youtube video that will show me how to frame the window and the wall,” she says. It was harder than it looked. “From the first day on the job site, it was doubt every day,” admits Cara. But she and her kids studied all the “grainy old videos” they could dig up on Youtube, she says, and persevered: “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?’” Cara ran plumbing and gas lines herself. When they weren’t busy with school, her older kids helped: Hope did the marking, Drew helped Cara draw the floor plans and everyone took turns watching then-toddler Roman. Cara’s parents pitched in, helping build kitchen and bathroom countertops, city inspectors offered advice and Cara paid a firefighter she’d met at Home Depot $25 an hour to help whenever she had extra cash. She labored on the house every day after her job, often working until 2 a.m. under the glare of her car’s headlights. She did, however, have to hire an electrician, a roofer and a heating and air conditioning specialist. “I was afraid I was going to blow us all up!” she admits.
It was the bonding experience they needed, especially after the toll of what Cara describes as a difficult third marriage. “We’d all felt powerless for so long,” she says, “but to slowly see this thing rise up out of the ground is a powerful feeling.” In March 2009, they moved in. “We literally built ourselves a better life,” she adds. “There is no doubt building this house changed everything for us.”
— Reporting by Jaclyn Roth