In 2008, Cara Brookins and her four children were prisoners in their own home - powerless to stop the domestic abuse that kept them trapped.

Brookins was married to a man who would often descend into traumatic bouts of paranoid schizophrenia. Even after she divorced him, he would continue to harass her and her children. She remarried, but her second husband turned out to be an equally violent man.

This was the last straw for Brookins. She left her second husband and moved her four children (ages 17, 15, 11 and 2 at the time) to a tiny house outside of Little Rock, Arkansas.

That's when she got the idea to build her own home.

She had just enough money to buy the construction supplies and an acre of land. Without a second thought, she and her family launched themselves on an incredible journey.

Together, they worked every day and late into the night, building their home one brick at a time.

They had nothing but YouTube and the generous people they met at Home Depot to guide them through the building process.

"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," she told CBS News.

It took nine months of hard work, sweat and tears. But everyone contributed and no one gave up. They hand-mixed the mortar for the foundation, ran gas lines and framed walls.

According to Brookins, building the house brought her family together again. For them, it was a physical manifestation of the strength it took for their family to rebuild their lives after the abuse.

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