5 Weirdly Useful Bathroom Items You Can 3D Print







If you are a DIY enthusiast looking for cheap and fun ways to upgrade your home, then it’s time to get yourself a 3D printer. Some filament and your imagination present virtually limitless opportunities. 3D printing things instead of buying them could save you money and open the door to things that nobody may even be selling — especially something designed specifically for your use case, and yours alone. So on the subject of upgrading your home, how about upgrading your … bathroom? Not the first place you think of when starting a 3D printing project, but you’d be surprised what weird (and useful) items you can make for it.

We searched far and wide through Maker World for 3D printed projects that aren’t just your typical bathroom organizers and toothpaste squeezers. For the most part, these projects should be pretty easy for beginners and printable on most consumer printers. These five items are weird, in the sense that they’re unexpected solutions to everyday problems in the bathroom, but useful because they help you keep your bathroom more clean, organized, and give you extra storage space — and might even do their job better than similar alternatives.

Teepee Toilet Paper Dispenser

There are few feelings in the world worse than being about to finish your business on the toilet and turning to find an empty cardboard roll staring back at you. Unless you have long enough arms to reach over and around into the cabinet for the extras, try the aptly named Teepee: Modular Bathroom Crisis Prevention System by The Philosopher. All this is a simple toilet paper roll dispenser that, in theory, could hold perhaps over a dozen rolls if you extended it as high as it would go.

The creator notes that you can use its alternative configuration where empty rolls can easily be removed and the next one can roll into place — though this would require printing individual rods for any roll that’s in the dispenser. Otherwise, this would work more like a traditional toilet paper holder, albeit with the extra rolls simply stacked up behind it in the dispenser for when they’re needed. In any case, the creator seems to be very open to anyone using and modifying the design — including a generous Creative Commons license — so if you’ve got those dinosaur-sized rolls, it’ll only take a few minutes in CAD software to redesign. Whatever choice you go with, the huge toilet paper dispenser will be the first thing visitors notice.

A few final notes. One, this is unfortunately a project that requires a lot of filament, and the pieces must be glued together. You could, in theory, add some screw holes to attach this to the wall as a permanent installation. However, the creator says that it’s light enough that double-sided tape should do. That said, this would be an excellent choice for a smaller guest bathroom with limited storage space, or a toilet-only bathroom with none.

Shower Phone Holder

Flagships these days often have high IP water and dust ratings, and if that wasn’t enough, it’s easy to find a waterproof case to keep your device dry. But if you want to bring it into the shower to listen to music and podcasts or watch YouTube, there’s not really a convenient place to put it. That’s where the ShowerTune by 3DMaker.Idea comes in. This 45-degree holder secures your smartphone on the top of the sliding door. The only requirement is that it be a phone with at least an IP68 rating.

The benefits speak for themselves. The phone is still in reach to change songs or turn up the volume without slippery hands losing their grip, and it likely stays well out of range of most of the shower’s backsplash. Its positioning makes it easy to watch something hands-free, and as an added bonus, this design makes the most of itself by including hooks for towels on the flip side. The only downside we can see is that this probably wouldn’t work with a shower using a curtain rod.

Now, it’s probably perfectly safe to use the shower phone holder, but we want to add the caveat that you could get uncomfortably close to water damage. Anecdotally speaking, I know people whose iPhones have given them a liquid-detection warning after using them in a hot tub. So just to be safe, after a shower, let your phone go without charging for a couple of hours so the USB port can dry out.

Modular shower trays

Maybe it’s just me, but it always seems like a proper pain in the rear trying to find a place for shampoo bottles and soap holders. Unless your shower has a little shrine for them, you’re stuck installing a suction holder that loves to randomly fall off, or bending over to grab the bottles from the corner of the tub. So one of the best upgrades might not be a smart gadget for your bathroom, but one (or more) of these Modular shower trays by FiftyFifty.

It’s a brilliant yet simple design that will give any shower more toiletry storage space than it knows what to do with. First, you print the tray that grips onto the sliding door rail. Then if you want more trays, you print the second option, which clips onto the first. You could probably have half a dozen of these things hanging off each other like monkeys in a barrel before running out of room.

Multiple different print options support varying glass thicknesses; there’s a hook for up to 30mm thick glass for the showers that need it. If that double-hook option isn’t strong enough to hold your shampoo bottles, then you can try this remixed version by Episode 3D that includes side beams for extra support.

Brush head stand

Electric toothbrushes are simple gadgets with surprisingly complex engineering, but they haven’t been able to solve one issue: saliva and toothpaste getting gummed up in their crevices. Anyone who has an electric toothbrush knows this. It’s pretty disgusting, and it seems like the perfect way to turn your toothbrush into a bacterial colony. Give yourself a place to store your brushes where they can dry out with the Oral-B Brush Stand for two by bo.

It’s literally just a couple of propped-up arms on a tray to hold toothbrush heads at 45 degrees so any liquid should drip off into the tray rather than staying crusted on the brush. Simple and straightforward. It’s likely most brush heads from any brand — not just Oral-B — would fit here. And if they don’t, the Creative Commons license means you are free to modify it for your own purposes; a couple of commenters tweaked the design to hold more toothbrush heads or to integrate it into other print projects.

The only thing the design is possibly missing is a drain hole. It would be nice if there were a little cutout at the edge to let excess water drip into the sink. Again, though, this is your 3D printer, so you are free to add that or any other modifications as you please.

Bathtub splash guard

A nice, hot bath is the best way to end a hard week. Water all over the floor when you get out, though, is not. As you will have guessed, a 3D-printed design is here to save the day. The Bathtub Splash Guard by DGates is a very simple printing project that should hopefully make your bathroom floor less of a slipping hazard without being an eyesore in your bathroom. It’s a curved triangle that you should be able to caulk into both corners of your bathtub to catch splashes that go up the lip and spill out the sides. DGates designed it with a young child who loves to splash in mind, so it’s smooth-edged and unlikely to hurt someone who accidentally hits it with a foot.

There are other splash guards that might be more suitable for you that we were unable to include in this list because of licensing reasons. Again, however, this is your printer and your wheelhouse. Anything you can imagine, you can print. Designing something to prevent water spillage while showering or bathing is a pretty simple project with a low margin for error that could teach you a lot about how you design future prints.





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ZDNET’s key takeaways

  • Amazon is reportedly developing a new Fire Phone.
  • The previous model had several issues, including an inferior app store experience.
  • Under new supervision (and with more experience), Amazon can do better this time.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t have “new Amazon smartphone” on my 2026 bingo card. As it turns out, according to Reuters, the retailer may be developing a new smartphone, internally known as “Transformer.” 

Those familiar with the industry will instantly draw parallels to Amazon’s previous smartphone effort, the Fire Phone from 2014. Appropriately, that phone ended up as part of a fire sale about a year later.

Now, in 2026, with no fewer than five phone brands in the US — Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, and OnePlus — Amazon faces a lot of competition. In fairness, it also has two fewer platforms to compete against. In 2014, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were still very much part of the smartphone conversation; these days, not so much.

The AppStore problem

But there’s one mistake Amazon made in its first effort that will absolutely torpedo its chances at succeeding — the Amazon AppStore and specifically the decision to forego Google Play services. Google is simply too valuable in too many lives to not support the platform. Oh, and the Amazon AppStore is terrible.

Also: What’s right (and wrong) with the Amazon Fire Phone

It has admittedly been a few years since I last inventoried the Amazon AppStore, but when I last checked, the Amazon AppStore was a wasteland of half-supported or unsupported apps, with two notable exceptions. Finance, home control, and communication apps were either absent or had not received updates for years prior.

The only apps in the Amazon AppStore that remained up to date were productivity apps (largely powered by Microsoft) and streaming apps. Those two categories work very well on the cheap, underpowered hardware that Amazon usually launches, and that’s fine. A coffee-table tablet is a nice thing to have lying around.

A spark of hope

Amazon Fire Phone

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But a phone is another animal entirely. If a tablet is a device to entertain, a phone is a device for everything else. One of the key reasons Windows Phone failed was its lack of an app ecosystem. The Senior Vice President of Devices and Services,  Panos Panay, is very familiar with that saga, so I’m hopeful that he will make the same arguments to the powers that be at Amazon. 

Honestly, if there is anyone who I think can pull off an Amazon phone revival, it’s probably Panay, who understands design and product development better than most, and to be perfectly honest, he’s my absolute favorite product presenter.

Also: Amazon Fire Phone review: Not a great smartphone

Of course, all of this is early days. This phone is being worked on internally, and even Reuters reports that it could get the axe long before it sees the light of day. Personally, I’m intrigued by the idea, but I sincerely hope that Amazon doesn’t make this the shopping phone it tried to build in 2014. 

If Amazon just wants to make a nice, well-built smartphone, with a skin that pushes Amazon content to the fore, I’m fine with that. But leaving Google behind is a mistake that Amazon cannot afford to make again. Fool me once, and all that.

So, if this phone is to have a chance at success, it needs to embrace Google services so it can be a phone that everyone can use. Amazon has the brand power to make a phone like this work, even up against juggernauts like Apple and Samsung, but it needs to approach this correctly, lest it end up in yet another Fire phone fire sale.





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