As promised, I am posting a few pictures of our newly renovated lab break room. I mentioned in an earlier post that during Thanksgiving 2011, we took down a wall that divided the front room from the back room. The front room used to be our lab breakroom and the back one belonged to my former lab, Dr. R's lab. During my fourth year as a graduate student in Dr. R's lab, we moved down the hall to a bigger lab space and his breakroom (the back room) has been left vacant. Well, with permission from Dr. Y, we opened up the space and now it is one big room. The back room was then painted blue and the exposed pipes and borders in white. The back room has a sink and lots of cabinets for storage so it was perfect as a kitchen. We acquired some furniture from a former lab member when I found out she was moving back to her home country. We now have her beautiful white leather couch.
With the backroom serving as a kitchen, J and I slowly equipped it with kitchen tools so we can make delicious lunches and sometime dinners in lab. We have a George Foreman grill that we regularly use to make a variety of panini. Dr. Y was kind enough to bring in a tabletop oven and we used it periodically to make our pecan crusted chicken salads and even tandoori chicken. Today we had prepared fresh "lab-made" pizzas for lunch. Being able to prepare fresh food in the lab sure does elevated my experience in Dr. Y's lab. J and I often spend time in this room discussing how to troubleshoot experiments over lunch or while we prepared food there. One could say that we "cooked away our frustrations" away in this new lab kitchen.
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| View from the hallway. |
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| Fridge and Sink. |
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| Painted dry eraser board with magnetic border. |
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| The painting is a courtesy of our janitor, Hector. |
