Google and d/l some graph paper for printing. Or buy a spiral notebook of it at an office supply store.

Other than that, you will need:

Measuring tape and partner to hold the smart end while measuring the space.

Fine Sharpie for the outline of the room.

Straight edge to make nice straight lines.

Pencil and eraser.

Colored pencils for drawing in pathways of your typical cooking projects when evaluatiing a plan you like. You don't need colored pencils, but it allows you to trace multlple meals on the same drawing w/o getting confused. And sometimes you'll find problems - i.e. places where you have to back track or cross another's path or working postion, repeatedly - crop up at the same place, over and over, which is an excellent indication that some more work needs to be done.

Once you have a plan you want to share, snap a pic of it and put it on photobucket; put it in a post and bingo - you'll get responses.

Hint: in the early iterations just sketch (to more or less scale) to free your self from details. Once you have any idea, then go back and do it perfectly to scale to make sure it works, including aisles.

BTW, if you haven't already you might find it very useful to check out the :Read Me" thread posted by BUEHL, which is usually found kicking around on the first or second page. It has tons of the Forum's collected wisdom about designing for functional work areas, plus tons of other goodies.

The reason I'm not suggesting a computer program is that I find people get hung up on the details of that if it's not something they do a lot of, every day. And that gets in the way of free-brain noodling which will get the process under way most productively.

Good luck and have fun.

(And if I may add a personal comment: I am impressed with your response to our somewhat less than enthusiastic embrace of your first design. As I mentioned, it's always dodgy dealing with that situation. But you have taken our critiques in the spirit that they were meant, i.e. not to be catty or mean, but trying really hard to be useful and helpful. I have confidence your design will evolve and you will get the most out of the Forum - and wind up with a really great kitchen in the end!)

Liriodendron

As you can see from my layout post, I am no stranger to the graph paper, pencil and sharpie. I think it comes from my D&D days (wow, I just dated myself). They ones I posted I actually did a year ago before we bought the house. I wanted to know where all the furniture would fit and everything before we ever bought it. Yes, I'm a bit OCD :D

I've been trolling forums for years (mostly in the A/V or Computer forums until now), so I know that when you ask opinions, you will get what you ask for. I trolled this forum for a while, and I really liked how helpful, and knowledgable people were, so I thought I'd dive in before we made out plans final.

So far, I am quite glad that I did!

Drafting tape-looks like masking tape but is easier to peal from paper- and a 12" roll of yellow tracing paper.

Tape graph paper with the space drawn on it to a board, tear off lengths of the trace (yes tear),
tape trace over it to quickly freehand variations, bubble diagrams etc. Can manage a few layers of trace. Sometimes I start with 3 layers of blank trace and remove one at a time as each is developed.

Still use it even with thousands in software.

My friend LOVES SweetHome3D. I'm have technological difficulties, and could not get it to work, but everyone else says it is super easy.

http://www.sweethome3d.com/