Design Documentation of Woodframe Project Index Buildings

Woodframe buildings come in a vast variety of sizes, plan and elevation configurations, and occupancies, and two seemingly identical buildings can also vary greatly in their construction details and quality. To apply project research results to specific cases, index buildings were carefully defined. An index building is a hypothetical but realistic archetypical design, developed almost to the point of actual working drawings (“blueprints”) that could be used to construct it. From four basic index buildings, three different levels of quality of construction and maintenance were designated. In addition, one or more examples of retrofit or alternate construction were developed for most of the index buildings, creating in total 19 different structural models.

Four index buildings were defined and are presented in this report:
Small house: One-story, two bedrooms, one bathroom, approximately 1200 square feet in floor area, prescriptive (conventional) design basis, built circa 1950;

Large house: Two-story, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, approximately 2400 square feet in floor area not counting a two-car garage, engineered construction design basis, built circa 1980s -1990s;

Small Townhouse: Two-story, each dwelling unit having three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, approximately 1,800 square feet in floor area not counting a two-car garage, engineered construction design basis, built in the 1990s;

Apartment Building: Three-story (ground story tuck-under parking and two stories of apartments), approximately 9,000 square feet in floor area not counting the parking level; each apartment having approximately 870 square feet of floor area, two bedrooms, one bath; partially engineered design basis, built in the 1960s.