If you own a 3D printer and you’re not using it to organise your home, you’re leaving some serious value on the table. I say this as someone who spent the first few months of owning my Bambu Lab P1S printing random models from Printables, miniatures, replacement brackets, the odd phone stand, before I had a proper lightbulb moment. The real power of having a printer at home isn’t novelty prints. It’s solving the dozens of small, annoying problems that accumulate quietly in every house: the drawer full of loose cables, the kitchen counter cluttered with things that don’t have a proper home, the garage workbench that looks like a crime scene. Once I started printing for organisation, I couldn’t stop.
The beauty of it is that the cost is genuinely minimal. A 50-gram PLA print, which covers most small organisers and cable clips, works out to roughly £1.25 in material. Even factoring in electricity and a bit of your time, you’re rarely looking at more than £2 to £5 per print. Buying a custom drawer insert or a wall-mounted tool holder from a shop would cost several times that, and it still wouldn’t fit your space perfectly. Printing your own does.
Before You Start
You’ll need a working FDM printer and a decent spool of PLA filament. PLA is the right choice for almost everything covered here. It’s easy to print, holds its shape, and is more than strong enough for home organisation use. Most UK filament brands sell 1kg spools for around £15 to £25, which is plenty for a whole run of projects. You’ll also want accounts on Printables.com and Thangs.com. Both are free, and between them they host the vast majority of the models mentioned below. Some designs come as ready-to-print STL files; others use online generators that produce a custom STL for your exact dimensions. I’ll flag which is which as we go.
Step 1: Start With Gridfinity, the Modular Standard That Changes Everything
If you’ve not come across Gridfinity before, prepare yourself. This is the project that turned me from an occasional printer into someone who prints constantly.
Gridfinity is an open-source modular organisation system created by Zack Freedman of Voidstar Lab, released under the MIT licence. The concept is elegant: everything is built on a 42mm x 42mm grid. You print a baseplate, then fill it with bins, holders, and trays that snap precisely into place. Want to rearrange things? Just lift and move. Some designs even use small magnets to add a satisfying click when modules snap together.
What makes it genuinely special is the community behind it. There are thousands of Gridfinity-compatible designs available, covering everything from kitchen utensil holders to garage tool trays to cable tidies. Thangs.com has an entire dedicated Gridfinity section worth bookmarking immediately.
Where to find the models: Search “Gridfinity” on Printables.com or head straight to Thangs.com. Both have enormous libraries.
Custom generator options:
- Extrabold.tools generates custom Gridfinity baseplates with real-time previews and printer-aware sizing. Very slick, no faff.
- Tooltrace.ai is a brilliant free tool that lets you photograph your actual tools on a sheet of A4 paper, traces their outlines, and generates a perfectly fitted Gridfinity holder for them. My garage bench has never looked better.
Where it works best: Kitchen drawers, home office desks, garage workbenches, art and craft areas, makeup storage. Essentially anywhere you’ve got small items that currently just float around in a drawer causing mild stress.
Print settings: Standard 0.2mm layer height, 15–20% infill, no supports needed for most bins.
Step 2: MultiBuild and MultiBoard for Walls and Heavier Storage
Gridfinity is brilliant for desktops and drawers, but it’s not really built for walls or heavy tools. That’s where MultiBuild comes in.
MultiBoard is a wall-mountable (or desk-mountable) connection board that acts as a backbone for a whole ecosystem of hooks, shelves, bins, and accessories. It’s modular in a different way to Gridfinity. Rather than a flat grid of snap-in bins, it’s a structural board you fix to a wall and then build outwards from. The system uses snaps, threads, pegs, and push-fits so the whole thing works together cohesively.
The companion system, MultiBin, is a modular drawer and bin system that can integrate with MultiBoard or stand alone. Useful for garages, workshops, and utility rooms where you need something that can handle a bit of weight.
The individual functional parts are free, though the project is supported by a community membership. You’ll find everything at the MultiBuild website and on Printables.
Gridfinity or MultiBoard? It depends on what you need. Gridfinity is ideal for organising smaller, lightweight items and offers brilliant flexibility for desktops and drawers. MultiBoard is the better choice when you need something more robust for heavier tools, wall-mounted setups, or workshop environments.
Where it works best: Garages, sheds, utility rooms, workshops. Any wall that currently has a nail with six things hanging off it.
Print settings: For structural wall-mounted parts, I’d recommend 30–40% infill and at least three perimeter walls. Don’t skimp here. This stuff needs to hold.
Step 3: Bento-Style Drawer Trays for the Quick Wins
Not every problem needs a full modular ecosystem. Sometimes a drawer is just chaotic and needs a custom tray to sort it out. Bento-style trays are the answer here. Inspired by the Japanese bento food storage design, they’re compartmentalised trays that fit specific drawers and divide the space up into tidy sections.
The fastest route to a custom bento tray is Bento3D, an online tool where you input your drawer dimensions and drag compartments into a layout that actually makes sense for what you’re storing. It generates a printable STL file. This takes about five minutes and produces something genuinely useful.
For pre-made designs, search “bento tray” or “drawer organiser” on Printables. There are hundreds of community-made variants for kitchen drawers, bathroom cabinets, craft storage, and office desks.
Where it works best: Kitchen cutlery drawers, desk drawers, bathroom vanity units, kids’ bedroom storage. Fast to print, immediately satisfying.
Print settings: 0.2mm layer height, 15% infill, no supports required.
Step 4: Cable Management, the Invisible Win
Cable clutter is one of those things that seems minor until you actually deal with it. Then you wonder why you lived with the chaos for so long. The 3D printing community has produced a solid range of cable management solutions, but the one I keep coming back to is called Cable Corners by designer muzz64.
The idea is simple but clever. Rather than cable clips that require screws or sticky pads that eventually fall off and take paint with them, Cable Corners grip power cables tightly against the wall and guide them cleanly around 90-degree turns. No adhesives. No screws. No permanent damage. They look neat and stay put.
Find the model on Cults3D by searching “Cable Corners muzz64”. It prints quickly and you can knock out a dozen in a single session.
Beyond Cable Corners, search Printables for “cable clip”, “cable tidy”, and “cable raceway” for a wide range of wall-mounted and desk-based solutions. Many are designed to hold USB cables flat against the back of a desk or guide charging cables through specific routes.
Where it works best: Behind TVs, along skirting boards, under desks, around entertainment units.
Print settings: 0.2mm layer height, 20% infill. PLA is fine for indoor use.
Step 5: Shadowboards for the Workshop or Garage
If you’ve got a collection of hand tools and you’re serious about knowing where everything is at a glance, shadowboards are the most satisfying solution in this entire list.
The concept: a flat board with cutout silhouettes of each of your specific tools. Each tool has a precise home, and when something’s missing you can see the empty shadow immediately. It’s a technique borrowed from professional workshops and it works just as well in a home garage.
The most flexible approach is to design your own layout using a tool like Tinkercad or Fusion 360. Trace around your actual tools on paper, photograph or scan the shapes, and model the inserts. Alternatively, search Printables for “tool shadowboard” or “tool holder insert” and you’ll find many pre-made designs for common tools like screwdrivers, pliers, chisels, and Allen key sets.
Print settings: This is where I’d increase infill to 25–30% and use PETG if you’re mounting in a garage, where temperatures can swing. PLA can warp in heat.
If It’s Still Not Working
The most common issue with organisation prints isn’t the printer. It’s the fit. If your Gridfinity bins are too loose or too tight in the baseplate, the first thing to check is your printer’s dimensional accuracy. Print a calibration cube, measure it with callipers, and adjust your X/Y scale in your slicer if needed. A difference of 0.2mm across a 42mm grid adds up fast.
If your bento tray doesn’t fit the drawer correctly, double-check your measurements. Interior drawer dimensions vary wildly, and it’s easy to measure the outside of a drawer rather than the inside. Measure twice, print once.
If wall-mounted parts feel wobbly or weak, revisit your infill percentage and perimeter count. Structural prints need more material, not more layers.
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Wrapping Up
Home organisation is one of those use cases where 3D printing absolutely earns its place in the house. The prints are quick, the materials are cheap, and the results are genuinely better than anything you can buy off the shelf because they’re made for your exact space. Start with a Gridfinity baseplate for one drawer, sort out your cable chaos with a handful of Cable Corners, and go from there. The projects above should keep you busy for a while, and your household quietly impressed.
If you’re still stuck on a specific project or your prints aren’t coming out quite right, drop me a message or bring the question to the newsletter community.
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