Renovating 60s Brick Ranch. Layout questions

[Jacob Edmond]

We are currently renovating a 1960s brick ranch we just moved into. We are working on opening up walls in the main areas to improve the layout. We are closing off the existing formal dining from the kitchen since it is too small for a modern dining room in our eyes. We to use one o the two living areas as a dining instead. We have gutted the whole kitchen, which had an eat in, and making the whole thing a bigger kitchen. We opened the wall between the two living areas as much as possible without moving the two main hvac returns. Now we are wanting to removed a 3 foot section of wall between the kitchen and the rear living area. It also turns out to be structural, so I'm going to have to put a header and column to support this across where we want to put an island. I'm thinking of just running a header across the whole 12 foot opening and centering 2 columns, 1 on each side of the island. We plan on framing in the original door into the rear living area as well now that we have opened up the wall.

Here is a plan view of the kitchen layout as we see it now.

 Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated.