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Cara Brookins family photo in front of house she built

Mom built a house for her family using YouTube videos as her guide

| Last updated on 09/20/2021

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Cara Brookins didn’t know where to turn. A divorced mom of four, she had just left an abusive marriage and had no place to live.

Then, she had a crazy idea. What if she built a house … by herself? Literally with her own two hands? With no construction experience, it seemed impossible, but Brookins soon realized she had a font of information at her fingertips: YouTube!

Yes, YouTube. With a plethora of how-to videos just an internet connection away, Brookins threw herself into action.

She bought a small plot of land (one acre in Little Rock, Arkansas), and drew up a blueprint. Once the city approved it, she started the massive project. She may as well have told her neighbors that she was about to build an ark — indeed, there were many who thought her idea was absolutely absurd.

However, with the support of her family, her children and helpful friends, Brookins actually did the unthinkable: She built a house with nothing other than YouTube videos as a guide. She completed the project in under nine months for about $130,000.

The house is 3,500 square feet, and is two stories with a brick facade. Brookins dubbed the home “Inkwell Manor” because she was an aspiring writer, and she wanted her home to be a place where she could write to her heart’s content.

Here she is in a Facebook photo, posing in front of Inkwell Manor with the four kids who helped her build it:

Brookins went on to write a book about her amazing experience building her own dream home.

The book is called “Rise: How a House Built a Family,” and it details how Brookins escaped an abusive marriage and built her own house from the foundation up with a work crew made up of her four children.

The memoir takes readers through Brookins’ inspiring journey, and shows how she and her kids poured concrete, framed the walls and laid bricks for their five-bedroom house.

This Facebook photo shows the family jumping for joy in front of their home:

Brookins has also penned several other books, including “Little Boy Blu,” “Timeshifters” and “Doris Free.” You can listen to her podcast here. She is also a motivational speaker and she teaches courses on goal-setting.

What an inspiring story!

[h/t: Shareably]

Hilarious Video Sums Up How Parents Act Before Having Company Over

Let me set the scene. It’s Christmas morning. You have just finished unwrapping your gifts. You’re enjoying a mug of cocoa while lazily checking out your awesome scores from Santa.

Suddenly, your mom bursts in the room, a panic-stricken look on her face. “The cousins will be here in two hours! Get up and start cleaning!” she shrieks. “I want this place looking spotless!”

Sound familiar? If so, you are going to love this hilarious video from comedian Chris Fleming. In the short clip, Fleming perfectly brings to the life the absolute mania that takes over a parent trying to get the house ready for the holidays.

“No can know we live here!” she shrieks, pushing in chairs, tossing around dish-rags and vacuuming with intense precision.

The video is a must-share, and siblings everywhere are sending around the clip, saying: “Doesn’t this remind you of Mom?”

gayle
YouTube, Chris Fleming

The character is the brain-child of Chris Fleming, a comedian who became an instant success on YouTube with his clever creation of Gayle Waters-Waters (yes, that’s her full name). The series “GAYLE” helped to launch Fleming’s unique brand of humor and spot-on imitations. Now, the video “COMPANY IS COMING!” has over 4 million views on YouTube.

The comedian told Forbes that the idea for his Gayle character came from a shopping trip he took to Crate & Barrel. There, he saw a woman that inspired him to bring Gayle to life, and after using her character in his stand-up show, he decided to bring her to life with the help of director Melissa Strype.

Fleming describes Gayle as:

“Gayle’s a middle-aged woman, stay at home mom type who descends deeper into madness each week. She’s frantic and desperate and will stop at nothing to maintain status in her community. I came up with her in ’09, saw a woman in Crate and Barrel that really inspired me. She was digging through place mats like it was Armageddon.”

Hmm… I think we all can relate to that feeling of panic that comes over you when you realize COMPANY IS COMING! and your house isn’t spic and span. (Or, as Gayle would say, “I want this place looking like Disney on Ice!”

gayke-2
YouTube, Chris Fleming

There are multiple videos of GAYLE to enjoy on YouTube, so head on over and LOL till your face hurts from laughing so hard.

Watch 15,000 Dominoes Fall And Prepare To Be Mesmerized

The products and services mentioned below were selected independent of sales and advertising. However, Simplemost may receive a small commission from the purchase of any products or services through an affiliate link to the retailer's website.

What takes 25 hours to assemble, but only two minutes to fall apart? Well, you are about to find out.

Lily Hevesh is a domino artist (yes, there is such a thing). She created this massive “Triple Spiral” domino display with 15,000 dominoes and, we would imagine, a lot of patience.

The project took her 25 hours, spread out over the course of eight days, to build — and just two minutes to fall. Her triple spiral video’s been watched over 38 million times on YouTube alone.

Check it out:


Source: 15000 Part 3 storey spiral resulting from Domino by ThereisEverything on Rumble

Hevesh has made a name for herself in this space; she’s created complex commercial campaigns for Honda and Ford, among others. Networks like NBC, FOX News, CNN and CBS have all featured her videos.

Lily’s YouTube channel has over 357 million total YouTube views and over 1.2 million subscribers. In other words, she’s kind of a big deal.

Lily Hevesh/Hevesh5.com

She started playing with dominoes in 2009 when she was 10, getting into the whole thing simply by searching “dominoes” on YouTube.

“Take it slow, be very cautious when you’re building, and if it falls down, know that it’s part of the domino process,” Hevesh previously told CBS News.

Hevesh, who hails from New Hampshire, says she owns about 70,000 dominoes. She also has a Guinness World Record under her belt. She was part of a team that set a record in 2016 for the most dominoes toppled in a circle. The amount they toppled? A cool 76,017!

Check out Hevesh’s YouTube channel for tons of other mesmerizing videos of her work. This video, which she created with a fellow domino artist several years ago, is the most-watched on her channel with a whopping 85 million views:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARM42-eorzE” /]

This satisfying video of 1,000,000 dominoes has earned an amazing 28.4 million views. You seriously won’t be able to look away!

This ASMR compilation of dominoes falling has also attracted plenty of eyeballs, with over 3.3 million views:

And here’s a reel of highlights from some of her “best projects,” which she shared in June 2017. Seriously astounding work!

Hevesh typically posts new clips of her projects to her channel every Saturday at 1 p.m. ET. The domino artist remains active on her channel even while attending the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. (Famous Rensselaer alums include Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, as well as a bunch of NASA employees and astronauts.)

In 2017, Hevesh closed up her domino studio and moved all 70,000 of her dominoes to her parents’ house, a process that she chronicled on social media:

For all you Hevesh superfans out there, she even has her own logo and line of shirts, too. Pretty impressive, considering she’s not even 30! Clearly, she has a bright future ahead of her.

Interested in starting your own domino art projects? Hevesh offers tips on her website, and you can grab a 100-pack of bulk dominoes on Amazon for $18.99 and shipping is free.

 

You’ve Likely Been Cutting Your Cake Wrong All This Time

Ever have one of those moments when you realize you’ve been doing something so wrong your entire life and the solution is SO OBVIOUS?!? That’s how I’m feeling now after watching this clip from Numberphile.

Apparently cutting a round cake into triangles is all wrong. The best way to do it is to cut a rectangle through the middle so that you can push the cake back together and keep it fresh for longer. Alex Bellos, a mathematician, uses this Letter to the Editor from a 1906 weekly Science magazine titled Nature to help with his demonstration.

Watch the tutorial and get ready to kick your cake-cutting game up a notch!