I'm thinking about knocking out a part of the wall between the kitchen and living room. As you are in the living room it is a solid wall. As you walk around to the kitchen there is a closet. In the kitchen, attached to the backside of the closet is a banister and the basement stairs are along the other side of the living room wall and you are looking at the back of the closet as you walk down the stairs. I believe the closet is the main load bearing point and I'm hoping I can cut out a "window" on the wall. I'm concerned about the stability of the lower portion of the wall once removed. There is a railing to the basement that would still be attached to the wall. I would hate to cut out the wall and have someone lean to hard on the railing and pull the wall down. Hope all of this makes sense.

 

Welcome to the forums! With the staircase there, I would bet it is load bearing, too. If all you want to do is install an opening in the wall, you can put a header across the opening to transfer the weight of the wall to the jack and king studs on the sides of the opening. I would be more concerned with overall weight transfer than I would about someone leaning on the wall. I doubt it would fall, as it will be tied across from jack to jack as a solid item. Hope this helps a little. Of course photos would help us give better advice. You can post them on a site such as photobucket.com and copy/paste the HTML code to your reply post.

 

The longer wall is probably the load bearing, not the short closet wall in front of it. You could put in a header but how big of an opening? What load is on the future opening? Another floor and an attic? With rafters or trusses? Big difference as to the size of opening for the required supports (trimmers), both in number and carrying those bearing (concentrated loads now) points down to the footings. Waiting for pics and answers... Be safe, G