In 2008, Jada, Roman, Cara, Hope and Drew Brookins built their 3,500-square foot home in Bryant with five bedrooms and a three-car garage.

Like any mom would, Cara Brookins calls her four children her proudest accomplishment. But it’s one of Cara’s other huge accomplishments in life that helped shape those children, three of whom are now adults, into the people they are today. She built a house. Well, they all did.

Hope, Drew and Jada all grew up in an unstable, often dangerous environment. Their first stepfather was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia soon after he and Cara were married.

“He was truly mad,” Cara said. “We divorced pretty quickly, but for the next decade he’d come by and torment my kids and me … Sure there was a restraining order and I can call the police and they would put him in the state hospital, get him stable on his medication and let him go … we couldn’t escape that.”

At that time, Jada was 3, Drew was 7 and Hope was 8. After a period of singleness, Cara married a man who she thought was simply “very protective,” an attractive quality after what she and her children had been through. But protective became overprotective and overprotective became abusive, and Cara endured nearly a decade of domestic violence.

During that time, she also had another son, Roman.

“It was this idea that I had four kids and if I get divorced again I’m never going to have this mom, dad, perfect family that I always wanted, so I stayed with that a lot longer than I should have,” Cara said.

She divorced again when Hope was 17 and Roman was almost 2. And at that point, after years of trauma and abuse, Cara, an author and computer programmer by trade, knew that she was going to have to pull the family together herself.

“I started feeling like I have to do something and I better do it quick because they’re going to move away,” she said, recalling the pressure to seemingly patch up her family before it was too late. “They didn’t have good self esteem, they didn’t have this idea of anything is possible, it was constantly this idea of retreat and survival day to day.”

So Cara began brainstorming what they could do to build their relationships back up — not realizing that it would be literal building that truly brought them back together.

She said they thought about running a marathon, climbing a mountain, going to counseling and many other “typical” feel-better endeavors. But none of those seemed right.

“I felt like it had to be something that we did physically — not going to sit on a therapist’s couch. That was not going to be the thing that healed us,” Cara said. “It had to be something that we worked together on in a way that we could communicate. We didn’t communicate well … That many years of trauma just makes you all pull inside of yourselves and you’re just tip-toeing around, waiting for the next thing that’s going to fly through the room — either verbally or physically.”

Around the same time these discussions were taking place,

Cara was also thinking about where she and the kids were going to live. With limited financial resources, the options were slim: They could rent an apartment or buy a small, old and broken down house. And since they didn’t like either of those choices, they came up with a third.

After seeing a tornado-destroyed home where only the bones remained, Cara said she realized that the elements of a house weren’t all that unfamiliar — bricks, nails, boards — and inspiration struck.

Jada, Cara and Hope Brookins in the front yard of the home they built themselves.

Cara didn’t have much trouble attracting the kids to her build-their-own-house plan. Just one simple phrase — “you can have your own room” — did the trick. But she also said that this massive project was a way to both metaphorically and literally build themselves a better life.

It was without realizing the true magnitude of the project that the Brookins family began their house building endeavor.

“We were just so naive. I had no idea what we were getting into. They had no idea,” Cara said. “We’re picking out our paint colors and our curtains — we’re not thinking about what it’s going to be like to slog through the mud and build a foundation and carry concrete blocks and 80-pound bags of mortar. It was really easy to be all-in at the beginning. It was harder to stay that way.”

They began building in December 2007. They didn’t have work boots so they wrapped their tennis shoes in plastic bags. They didn’t have good winter outerwear, so Cara wore her high school letterman jacket. They didn’t have waterproof gloves, so their hands would freeze as they worked.

For nine months, Cara woke up at 4:50 a.m. and went in early to her full-time job writing computer software and left at 3 p.m. to pick up the kids from school and head out to the construction site to work late into the night.

They learned from YouTube instructional videos how to complete each task, but had to memorize the processes at home since watching a video onsite, on a smartphone, wasn’t an option. Drew was her number one construction assistant while Hope and Jada took turns helping with construction and watching 2-year-old Roman.

“I watched Roman a lot, and when Hope was watching Roman, I did what everyone else was doing,” said Jada, who was 11 during construction. “I helped with the framing; the siding and the hardwood flooring upstairs were probably my favorite because they connect and it’s something you can actually see progress on.”

The construction process taught the family how to communicate again after years of living in fear. Cara said they learned to laugh together again in the midst of that cold, muddy, impossible project.

“I had never had a mindset of ‘I can’t do that’ or ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ It was ‘I don’t know how to do that yet,’” Cara said. “Give me some supplies and couple of minutes and I’ll get as close as I can. That mindset is what saved me.”

But even with determination and YouTube tutorials, it was exceedingly difficult.

“(We messed up) almost every single thing at least once,” she said, laughing. “The amount of times that we had to take things out and do them over again was just ridiculous. Probably one of the biggest disasters was that my plumber was a real idiot, because that was me.

“You get really comfortable with not knowing how to do something and admitting it in the aisles of Lowe’s. Like ‘so if you were putting in a shower, what parts would you buy?’ and just accepting that.”

Despite the bumps in the road, the Brookinses met the nine-month deadline that they were required to adhere to with the construction loan.

Even though some things were rough — they had concrete floors at first to save money and a scrap lumber rail around the porch — they passed inspection on the first try.

They continued to make improvements on the home and now, years later, the front porch has a professionally installed iron rail and the flooring has been upgraded.

Cara has also put personal touches on the home with her art work including a mosaic and hand-lettered quote from her book.

Cara and Roman, 11, with a mosaic Cara created in the background.

Cara recently had the chance to talk to a former producer of the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” who’s interested in possibly working on a show involving Cara and her family. She told him during their conversation that she used to fantasize about the “Extreme Makeover” crew coming in and finishing their house.

He laughed and said, “Well, it was my job to pick the families; I totally would’ve picked you. Obviously.”

Yet looking back, Cara said she can’t imagine what their lives would be like without having completed this project themselves.

“The thing is, we needed to rescue ourselves. Was it easy? Oh my gosh, no, it was hard. But it’s immeasurable what it gave to us,” Cara said.

The experience pushed her kids to become the successful adults they are today. Drew lived in Alaska for a year exploring and recently constructed his own 3D printer. Hope lived in Los Angeles and D.C. for a time pursuing her career interests and runs her own business. Jada plans to move to Canada soon.

“It’s definitely made me braver to try new things,” Jada says. “I moved to a homestead for four months and lived in a tent in the mountains and learned about sustainable living and eco-building.”

But Cara said she hasn’t always been proud of the fact that they built her own house, and it took her years to come to terms with the idea of sharing her story with the world.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to remember. It was something I was embarrassed to be doing,” she said. “It felt like a source of shame to us that we were building a house because of the road we were on to get there. We were in such a low place that this was our best option to build our own shelter? That didn’t feel good.”

After speaking with a fellow author later on, she eventually decided to tell her story. But as a fiction writer, this was her first go at non-fiction. Although it was easier to tell the impressive story of building a house, she struggled with opening up about the “dark parts” of her story, and it took her six years to finish the book.

“To get raw and honest and say ‘here are the worst mistakes I ever made’ and owning the part of the blame that should be with me, and saying here how I hurt the people I love most in the world — that’s tough,” Cara said. “But the more that you say it and own it, it gives you so much power over your history. And if you don’t fully own your history, there’s no way to build your future.”

Her book, “Rise” was released in January of this year and garnered national media attention, including a feature on the “Today Show” and coverage by news outlets across the country. She’s also in talks with producers about a film or television series.

Cara’s daughter Hope has helped with the public relations work since the release of Cara’s book, “Rise.”

Although building a house may have been the family’s single biggest struggle, and one of the most difficult tasks Cara took on as a single mom, she said the difficulties of single-handedly managing a household and parenting four kids never go away.

Even as her kids are now adults and independent, she still strives to provide the emotional support that they look to her for.

“The goal is to build them up to where they’re also relying on one another for some of these things. But I think that remains a challenge to single parents throughout their lives,” Cara said. “How do you juggle it? You cut yourself a lot of slack and you know that I can not do all of these things perfect at once. I cannot be a perfect mother to my kids, make perfect gourmet meals, compete in my career perfectly and have my car perfectly clean and detailed and the lawn mowed.”

And when Cara isn’t managing her own life, family and career, she’s often reaching out to those who are in the place she once was — one of trauma, hurt and fear.

As a motivational speaker, she has shared her story with many groups around the country. She has a huge place in her heart for domestic violence victims and has been involved with Women & Children First in Little Rock. She said she battles against the advice these victims often receive to “just start small” and take baby steps.

“Just get out of bed today and make a pot of coffee; just put on your running shoes and eventually you’re going to run a marathon if you just put on your running shoes every day,” Cara said, shaking her head. “No. That is the most ridiculous, horrible advice I’ve ever heard.

“And that’s what I was trying to do before we built the house. Everyday I made a pot of coffee and I had my socks on. And what’s really discouraging is that you can never get out of that kind of a slump, that kind of a depression or trauma with those sorts of baby steps. So what I’m always pushing and the advice I’m always giving is to take a leap and do that impossible thing that changes the way you see yourself, that changes your perspective.”

And for Cara, that meant building a house.

“That shift of seeing myself as strong changes everything.”

The Brookins family used YouTube videos to instruct them on how to build their house — a feat made much more difficult by the absence of smartphones in 2008. They would watch the tutorials on a computer at their temporary residence and then remember all they could as they framed windows, laid flooring and more.