New city. New workspace

In August, we moved from our old apartment near Harvard Yard in Cambridge to a nicer, newer place in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. Among the many new experiences associated with moving to a new home and city, a new kitchen is one of the things that is most pertinent to this blog. It is, after all, where a lot of the food on this website is produced. While my new kitchen is certainly a cut above my old Cambridge kitchen in form, I'm not sure that it is a step forward in function.

Here's the old kitchen in Cambridge:

and here is the new kitchen in Wicker Park:

The new place certainly looks nicer. We traded linoleum floors and faux granite counters for hardwood and real granite, and I love our giant new fridge. We also got a lot more cabinet space and, thankfully, our new cabinets don't look like they are straight our of the 1950s.

We also got this nifty chalkboard and a built in wine rack.

I love how the new kitchen looks, but there are some things about the old kitchen that I miss. In our old place, we had a big walk in pantry that had tons of storage space. There's no pantry in our new place, so, in spite of all the extra cabinets, I feel like I have less storage space. We also don't have space for a breakfast table or kitchen island, so we don't have as much usable counter space. I often like to have several different things going at once in the kitchen, so this is a big drawback. Also, the sink in our new space is smaller, which is really annoying.

I'm sure I'll love the new kitchen after I've had some more time in it, but for now, I'm still getting used to it.