The concept of a ready-to-assemble kit fabricated in a factory and delivered to the customer is well known and commonly used by the furniture industry. In wood construction, the lack of a simple and reliable method of assembling the frame members creates a barrier to wide acceptance of prefabricated kit structures. This thesis focuses on a novel technology of assembling structural components of a wood frame using a metal nail plate connector (NPC). This technology was referred to as a ready-to-assemble (RTA) wood framing system. The RTA system simplifies the framing process and allows for rapid erection of a wood structural frame by a small nonprofessional crew. A 16 x 24 foot RTA building was constructed to demonstrate the feasibility of the RTA system concept. An effective assembly sequence was proposed and successfully implemented. The design procedure for the RTA buildings was presented. The lateral load path for the RTA building includes diaphragms and shear walls. The contribution of the RTA frame can be ignored from the lateral load analysis. This conclusion was validated for the diaphragms with aspect ratios up to 4:1. The finite element method was used to model the RTA structures. The models incorporated semi-rigid behavior of the NPC. An analytical model was developed to predict the nonlinear moment-rotation relationship of the NPC. The proposed model showed a good agreement (R2=0.98) with the experimental data. Tests were conducted to measure the load-drift response of the RTA shear walls. / Master of Science