When we purchased our lake home there were several items we wanted to replace or fix due to the home inspection. We are down to the last two big items on that list: a Juliette balcony that was sloped towards the house and caused the sliding door to rot, and a new deck ( the posts do not have proper footers and are rotting). Hubby and I have spent the last three weekends taking care of the Juliette deck/ sliding door issue. We took out the sliding doors thinking we would install the windows and then remove the deck. As soon as we took the sliding door off it’s hinges the bottom fell off where the rot had occurred. We realized we had to remove the deck to clear a space to add the new framing. The deck was cantilevered into the master bedroom with large beams and then there were cross beams bolted into the house. We recently (last two months) put in a brand new ac unit for the whole house. We moved the unit to the back of the house when we replaced it because the old one was trapped under the stairs to the deck and difficult to get to. Unfortunately, we didn’t think about the deck removal. We could have unbolted the cross arms and then just cut the deck and let it drop prior to this upgrade. Now we had to be creative to prevent dropping the heavy wood beams 20 feet onto the new unit. Hubby removed the railings and many of the floor boards from on top of the deck. We looked into scaffolding but the costs to rent scaffolding high enough for this project were unappealing. Hubby came up with an idea to tie off each cantilevered beam to another and then cut. This allowed us to let the beam swing out and then slowly lower it to the ground away from the air conditioning unit. This project was very hard on me, if you know me you know how much I fear heights and having a six foot wide opening over a 20+ ft drop made me extremely nervous. Especially when the hubby was out on the ever shrinking deck. Once the deck was fully removed, we framed a wall unit to fit the opening. We used the rough opening dimensions to design space for the two windows replacing the siding doors. Once we had the wood frame complete. We decided to add the OSB and windows to prevent needing to go up on a ladder outside. We followed the instructions on the pella website to add house wrap, square the windows, and add flashing. Throughout the process, we lifted the framing into the opening to ensure the fit was good. We created a tab by screwing a piece of wood on the inside of the frame to catch the header beam when we lifted the heavy wall for the final fit. We also screwed a foot board to the exterior of the house to keep the wall from falling out. It didn’t end up being an issue because we were very close on our measurements and it fit in snugly.Now we are going to put the flooring back in, insulate, add drywall, and soon we will have our master suite back!