Usually there is a shelf located where the upper and lower doors meet, dividing the cabinet into two compartments. The cabinet pictured on the left is of a typical construction. By simply opening a door wide and sliding its bottom peg toward the center, the door can be easily removed. The bottom of the cabinet aligns not with the bottom door but with the bottom of the three narrow panels below the door, thus creating a higher space below than above. Like this one, many cabinets have a removable skirt to fill the void between the lowest panels and the floor.
Cabinets are invariably mortise and tenon construction with the top pegged in place.
They are glued and thus are held together normally without benefit of nails or screws. It is common for the cabinets to be decoratively painted only on the front. Occasionally the sides may have simple designs, or sometimes even, only one side may be decorated. This eccentricity may indicate its original placement in a room, or more likely, that this chest was originally part of a pair. In that case the left side of one cabinet and the right side of the other might be painted while the opposite sides of the two, never to be seen, remained unfinished.