I have been working on this for a few months now, and I decided I would look for help on here. I have been trying to play LAN with my brother but no matter what, we are unable to even see the LAN game when one of us hosts.

We have tried turning our firewall off, ensured that we are on the same subnet, even hooked up an ethernet cable between our laptops and were still unable to see each other's games. We have also uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times to try and remedy the issue.

Can someone give me some help to try and figure this out?

An alternative would be to use the unofficial patch called SWBFSpy. It's a separate master-server that isn't plagued by stability issues and a lack of dedicated servers. You should be able to simply make a passworded room (not on the LAN tab) via the service without much hassle.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693147305

There is an option to specify the address you try connecting. If you're using a local connection between the machines the local address should work (either 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.X where X is the rendered local ID the router or you rendered to the laptop).