Removing a supporting interior wall

Question

In about a week I’ll be closing on a new house and am looking to remove this short distance of wall between the kitchen and living room. Based on the direction of the roofline, I’m pretty sure it’s a supporting wall, which means I’ll need to put in an LVL beam. A few questions I’m hoping someone here can help with:

1. Will I need to run it the entire length of the wall (e.g. dig into above the current doors)?
2. What type of wood should I purchase to support the LVL beam on either side?
3. Can you recommend a good online calculator to figure out the dimensions of the LVL beam I need to buy, or tell me the dimensions?

Additional information:

1. It’s a single floor space, so no extra weight above it other than rafters and roof
2. Snow: the house is near Cleveland Ohio, so in the winter we get (on average) up to a foot of snow at a time.

^{Picture of wall coming out}

Dimensions from inspector. Dividing wall isn't pictured, but is between kitchen/dining and living room:

^Floorplan

Answer 1

Will I need to run it the entire length of the wall (e.g. dig into above the current doors)?
Depends. What are the existing headers bearing on? What will you bear new trimmer studs for the new beam on? If you can run new trimmer studs down to the subfloor and block underneath to something capable of bearing the load, you can use a separate beam.

What type of wood should I purchase to support the LVL beam on either side?
Standard SPF studs are fine. There really is nothing else commonly available. The span may call for them to be doubled.

Can you recommend a good online calculator to figure out the dimensions of the LVL beam I need to buy, or tell me the dimensions?
Talk to your lumber yard. They have people on staff trained to do this. Even with a couple decades of homebuilding experience I don't trust a simple calculator to cover all the nuances of a situation.

Also note that this kind of thing typically requires that you pull a permit and facilitate inspections. Therefore, present your proposal to the inspection office before starting, to reveal any concerns they may have before you have to tear it apart and redo it.

Also also note that you need to properly support the framing above while you do this work. That's often done with a temporary wall on one or both sides, but it depends on the actual framing scenario. Be safe.