When I was about four years old, mom and dad had finished the home on the farm at East Garland, Utah where I would grow up.  We had been living in Tremonton in two different homes, at different times, on North Tremont Street where my grandfather, W.A. Adams had remodeled and made two residences in each--one for our family and one for he and grandma Adams.  They were bulding a new red brick home for my grandparents in Tremonton, and dad and granddad were running the farm and building our house from the old residence that had been mostly torn down where my dad and his siblings grew up.

The house was small -- only 685 square feet.  The exterior was green stucco. The living room at the front of the house comprised about half of the dwelling and extended the full length of the house (11 ft X 22 ft). The front of the house (facing east) had a 3 ft door in the center, and on each side there was a large picture window (4 feet x 4 feet).  I remember that furniture in the living room took quite a bit of space. My maternal grandfather, Herman Thiessens, having been a furniture finisher, had made a china closet, a large round table with three leaves that would expand it (and I think these were left in most of the time), and a buffet with drawers in the center and an opening on either end with a door that opened toward the front of the buffet.  The table and chairs were on one end of the living room with the buffet and the china closet were against the walls in that half of the room.  On the buffet was an old mantle clock that was part of the decor for as long as I can remember,

One of the games we would play, using the dining room table with all the leaves in, was table tennis, We would stretch the net across the middle of the table and it became a great table tennis table!  The problem, however, was that the edges were beveled, and when a ping-pon ball hit the edge, it would immediately veer off into a direction that was almost impossible to anticipate.

On the other end of the living room was a hide-a-bed where my parents slept at night, and it was a sofa by day.  A television set was also on this end of the room once we got one.  Usually a chair or two were along the walls--not all of them were around the dining room table--there in the living room. On Sunday afternoons, my grandpa Adams would often come to your home for the afternoon, and invariably he would fall asleep while sitting in one of those chairs by the wall.  He often slept with his mouth open, and we grandchildren would delight in taking the Sunday newspaper, roll it up, and see if we could put it in his mouth and back out again without waking him up!  Most of the time we succeeded.   In the center of the room directly across from the front door was a butane heater for warmth.

On the south side of the living room (the house faced east), an opening went into the small kitchen (8.25 feet deep).  On the south side were cupboards, drain-board, and sink.  Next to the living room wall was a table with kitchen chairs, and on the north end was abutane  heating stove, using the same chimney as the living room through the wall.

West of the kitchen opened up into the porch where the refrigerator, washing machine and a large sink for cleaning the milking machines were found.  A chalkboard was placed against the east wall of this porch, and whenever we needed to have a "bum" lamb in the house where it was warm so we could feed it milk with a bottle to save it's life, or to keep new baby chicks warm, the chalkboard would be pulled across the opening between the porch and the kitchen as a door, so they couldn't run through the rest of the house.  This room was used to wash the milking machines in addition to the laundry and was considered by us to be almost the largest room in the house, except for the living room!

A small hallway from the kitchen separated the bathroom, located just north of the kitchen and two small bedrooms west of the hallway and north of the porch.  The seven of us children slept in these two bedrooms--my two younger sisters had one bedroom, and we five boys shared the other with two sets of bunkbeds and a crib.  The girls' room extended out a ways from the rest of the house to the north.

My favorite room was the bedroom.  During the day, when I had some time, I would lay in one of the bottom bunks and read books such as "The Hardy Boys Adventures".  I liked stories of mystery like Nancy Drew, and later in high school I read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "The Night They Burned the Mountain" which was about Dr. Dooley's work in Laos.  I enjoyed reading about Dr. Albert Sweitzer's work, as well.  I remember helping my brother, Lloyd, prepare a talk for Sunday School in that bedroom on the day that my brother, Steve,  and sister, Janice, were playing with matches in the army barracks across the lane from the house when they started a fire that cause us to lose the barracks and my prize sheep that were in it.  But that's another story.

Most of the time was spent doing chores outside or in the barn, or irrigating and later moving sprinklers in the various fields of the farm comprising almost 200 acres.  So we were in pretty close quarters when all of us were at home!  I lived there until I moved away to Logan, about 15 miles east of our farm, to attend Utah State University when I was 18 years old.  At that time, my youngest brother, Doyle, was 4 years old.  When I moved out, he no longer had to sleep in the crib!