Thanks everyone. I'm thinking that I'll probably just have my family members who are GC's come over and install the beam and I'll do the rest of the work removing the wall and what not. Knowing them, they probably won't even charge me if I can lend them a hand doing something else. That way...
I have attached a rough floor plan for your review. Basically, we want to make the wall represented by the red lines into a half wall surrounding the basement stairs. The length of the wall we would be removing is maybe 15'. The roof is a hip roof with regular spliced rafters. In the...