Don't work in the kitchen, other than some simple, clean non-fume-producing tasks like filtration, crystallizations, did make a fair bit of GHB as a nipper in there until I had a flash-boiling mixture of caustic soda, gamma-butyrolactone dissolved in aq. methanol erupt out of a flask and hit me right in the eye the very nanosecond I adjusted my goggles to scratch the end of my nose, and COVER the kitchen. Thing went off like krakatoa, plastering (and in some, thankfully out of the way of line of sight, melting the ceiling, walls, windows, door, cupboards, fridge/freezer, the full works)
To this day, I honestly have absolutely no idea how on earth I managed to cover that up, after sticking my eyes under the cold tap. But somehow managed not only to wipe and then rinse pretty much all of it off, but to rescue the portion of my yield, in a large part, that blasted itself up and out of the condenser. For reasons of covering my arse, I am not going to admit to how large a quantity was made, and splattered over the room, but it was more than I cared to lose, put it that way.
And GBL is not that easy to cover up either, it STINKS something awful. Not so much a very strong, overpowering quantitively kind of smell, but qualitatively, its bloody awful, kind of like what I imagine burnt rubber bike tire innertubes would smell like if rubber could rot like a piece of flesh does if its left somewhere long enough, an acrid, piercing, gag-inducing kind of burnt rubbery burning plastic-ish kind of stench.
GBL doesn't have the carrying power, stenchwise, of something like an isocyanide, or say, methanethiol, but what smell it does have is really repulsive, possibly it isn't the substance itself, but some sort of oxidation product, as the stink gets worse and worse the older the lactone is.
No idea how i got away with that, without my parents knowing something was up. Of course they did know I'm a chem/bio hacker, so I could tell them it was more or less anything other than making GHB, but I was shocked nobody noticed any melted plastic fittings anywhere, and that the stink had been successfully vented out.
I much preferred my old lab, which was in the garage, when we still had one. We had to convert it to a downstairs bedroom though when my mom's MS became too much for her to ever get up or down the stairs again (she needs a roof track-mounted hoist thingy now to be transferred from wheelchair to bed.) My current workspace is too small for my needs really. And it places too much constraint on what I can store or work with; in terms of toxicity, stability, pyrophoricity, biohazard etc.
