[blucille]

the basement could help tremendously. Having access to the attic is good too. I've had great luck with wireless products from Ubiquiti, available online. Their software is easy to navigate, and I've found their hardware far more reliable than the gear you buy in the box stores. Nothing has needed rebooting, as I often had to do with netgear, linksys, dlink and others.

One cool thing, most of their products support PoE, so if attached to a PoE switch, you would simply need an ethernet cable to each device.

These can run in wireless repeater mode, but I suggest instead using them as a wireless access point with an ethernet cable attached.