Alno has a nice, free kitchen design planner:
Alno USA - TERMS OF USER LICENSE FOR KITCHEN PLANNER
It is, of course, for -their- cabinetry. I used both the Alno and IKEA planners, -and- SketchUp when I was originally intending to redo my kitchen. The Alno one is ONLY metric (so I kept a cheat-sheet of cabinet sizes conversions). It does have nice lighting/3D rendering. You can also change the widths/depths of the cabinets, in case of needing something custom. While I fully intended to only use IKEA cabinets, I found the Alno one less frustrating, less "quirky"...but it does have it's eccentricities, too.
SketchUp is a great application. It has a bit of a learning curve. There is a large collection of IKEA kitchen furn. available in the
library
, and a huge collection of textures. You can download all the
AKURUM
kitchen cabinet bodies in one file. I used SketchUp to create the kitchen/family room "whole environment" -- something I would not be able to do in either of the planners -- to see what the kitchen would look like from the family room. It will take a bit of getting used to. I prefer to use SketchUp on my PC desktop than on my Mac laptop.
There are some other freebie planners; I think Better Homes & Gardens have one, and there's one on DIYnetwork (I was NOT impressed).
I still go back to the IKEA planner for essentials because it's the simplest and easiest... Like re-arranging my sewing room; or re-doing the office cabinets. I'll mess around in the IKEA planner, get ideas, figure things out, and then do a model in SketchUp.
(NB: I've had more trouble
w
/SketchUp v.7 crashing than V.6; but might be my particular config.)
