Mammie I have a few names for you. I'm pretty sure that you need a carpenter. I have a customer that's a handy a handy man too. I'm pretty sure that the interior walls are the same as your current home. I'll email you latter with a couple of phone numbers.

Thanks for the replies. KGSD we actually did move our door in our current home to outside wall - put mirrored sliding doors. Not sure if I'd do this in this situation or not, depends on how I work the furniture in the floorplan. Would love to see anyone's bathroom photos that are similar in the layout. Need ideas! I have no vision, need to feed off others ideas.

slightly OT but still in the spirit of things: for over 20 years we lived in the converted carriage house of an 1886 Queen Anne brick house. The living room was on the second floor as it formerly was the hayloft, a huge room but awkward as it was roughly 25 feet long and 14 feet wide. There was a wonderful window (12 ft x 12ft) with an arched top in the middle of the long wall and the ceiling was 14 feet tall. It just begged for a truly enormous REAL Christmas tree, which we did for all those years. Now, mind you, I was in my 30s then, able to leap tall buildings -- well, at least able to climb my great-aunt's borrowed 12-ft ladder to hang ornaments on those 12-foot trees. The most difficult thing to do was to get the naked tree up the enclosed circular inside stairs from the driveway. It took three men to do that job, usually (tho there was the one year when we had the wrapped tree waiting to be hauled up and told our teenaged son to wait til we got home -- typically, he proved his manliness by ignoring us and hauling it up all by himself proudly. At 41 and the papa of four, he is now mostly more sensible, thankfully, lol). Our Christmas tree in those days took me well over a week to decorate. I am very fussy about my tree, and am the sole decorator. Nobody seemed to mind, tho one year time ran out before I had finished the backside and my DH has never let me forget it ("did you do the back?" he still says. Humph to him, says I). The tree stayed up til at least Twelfth Night and had to be cut into pieces at that point to be removed and thrown out the large window -- no way to get it back down those narrow circular stairs. One spring during outdoor burning season, we burned some yard debris including the old tree, and it was most sobering to see how extremely fast a dry Christmas tree went up in flames. Now that I am past the desire and ability to decorate gi-normous trees, and having lost my enthusiasm for vacuuming their needles well into July (how DO they manage to still be lurking??) we have long had artificial trees. I mostly miss the wonderful fragrance, but this way I can keep them up longer and enjoy what Ginny said -- the loveliness of lights and color at this bleak time of darkness. And I meant what i said in my previous post. Thanks to my new faux tree I am definitely going to cover it and leave it for next year. Why try to improve on near-perfection, hmmm? =) I'll stop now. Enough already! Thank you for your kind indulgence.

This change is probably doable, but will involve some significant work to keep the structural integrity. The post you want to remove is certainly load bearing. To replace it you will have to install robust support posts on either end of the span, and then install a beam between them that can support the weight. In most new homes they are using manufactured wooden LVL beams instead of steel beams, although you can probably still get steel beams. The challenge is that you would want the bottom of the beam to be as high as possible, so you need to remove or modify existing framing to recess it as much as you can. LVL beams are generally taller for longer spans, although in some cases they can be doubled up (width) to carry a bigger load. However, the beam will be relatively bulky for a span that long. If you like the look of reclaimed lumber you may be able to install a new LVL beam and then glue on a veneer of reclaimed lumber (maybe 1" thick) to make it look like the entire beam is reclaimed lumber. When I hired a contractor to open my floor plan and install new beams it was very easy for him to figure out span length and sizes, since the manufacturers had good documentation. However, the city required me to have the plans reviewed by a PE, who signed off and stamped the plans. It was a waste of time, since my contractor understood the work better than the PE, but the PE had the right credentials and the official stamp. Bruce