Jenna from SAS Interiors was inspired to create a set of honeycomb shelves for her son and daughter’s shared bedroom.
And there’s a fortunate twist.
As she says about the design, “Not only are these honeycomb/hexagon shelves functional, the whole ensemble is like a piece of art.”
Jenna finished them with a weathered blue stain and then really made them pop by outlining the front edge with bright white paint. You just have to love how they turned out!
Making Honeycomb Shelves in 5 Steps
There wasn’t too much craziness involved for Jenna to complete her nifty project. For the wood, she used 6-foot pieces of 6″x 1″. If you make the same amount of hexagon boxes for your shelves as Janna, you’ll want a total of seven of these boards.
Depending on your layout, if you connect some of the honeycomb boxes together, they will share a side. This means fewer sides in total need to be cut if you think of producing six sides per box.
Use some graph paper like Jenna did to sketch out a design first. Or, you can just follow what Jenna did, since again, her design made for the perfect intersection of art and functionality.
1. Cut:
These shelves look a lot more complex than they really are. They are really just made up of six equal sides.
This means, that once you measure and cut one piece, you simply duplicate this a few dozen times are so and voila, you have all the pieces for the entire layout of your wall shelves.
Jenna chose 7″ length sides, which produces a perfect size for the typical small-medium room wall space.
Now, the angle…
Since you’re not making square boxes, each end of the sides must be cut at an angle. Jenna set her miter saw 30-degrees, and that did the trick.
If you remember from geometry class, six sides would all join up six times to total 180 for a hexagon. This will give you an absolute enclosed hexagon shape!
2. Screw:
Once you have all your pieces (Jenna had more than 40 for her design), it’s time to secure them together.
Go with screws and not nails, per Jenna’s recommendation. She also points out the standard rule of drilling pilot holes first for each screw, or your wood can split.
3. Sand:
For a super smooth finish before you stain, you’ll want to sand down the shelves. This will help a stain go on more evenly and eliminate any imperfections in the wood – rustic and hexagon artwork probably don’t go together, right?
4. Stain:
Now one of the many fun parts to this project – applying the color.
This is wide open per your preference and design demands. Our DIY expert’s inspiration was a solid white inside and out. She went with a blue-toned stain and white paint on the front edges.
This is more dramatic of course, but see what works for your color scheme.
5. Hang:
Once your color application is dry, you’re almost ready to secure to the wall. Jenna used mounting brackets on the inside of the boxes.
Place in each box as it makes sense, i.e. not every box will need a bracket if you have more than a couple joined together.
Don’t worry, you can do what Jenna did and paint over the shiny metal bracket with your wall paint color. This hides it enough so that the hexagon boxes have that floating feel.
Trim (optional):
As mentioned above, Jenna made her shelves really pop with a contrasting white color on the front facing trim.
Take a look at her photos, and I’m sure you’ll be convinced it’s the way to go if you used a darker stain for your boxes.
Using a small brush, you can easily do this after the shelves are secured to the wall.
Obviously the final step is to fill your shelves with fun items such as books, small toys, photos, decor items, whatever. And yes, decorating them is THE most fun part of the project!
Jenna was inspired by Land of Nod’s Honeycomb Wall Shelf.
Now that you have the basic steps in your down in your mind, you can decide if this is the project for you.
One catch for the novice decor DIY’er is that you do need an accurate miter saw to make your angle cuts. An orbital sander is helpful too, but you can easily use a sanding block to smooth your shelve’s wood surfaces.
When you’re ready, head on over to Jenna’s complete tutorial to build your own at SAS Interiors.