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Rawlins County Kansas | You have a lot of options to get a wifi built for your situation and I'll throw out a couple. The nice thing about wireless is you can start with the minimal and then work your way up.
1) A good router tied to the network (either wired or as an AP) put in a window in the basement that faces the the building. The Buffalo WHR-HP-G54's are some of the best, low cost routers with a good amplifier that I have found. A repeater is then placed in a building window (facing the basement window). Most major companies offer a repeater kit. For one location, I'm using a Linksys WRT54G with a Linksys WAP54 running as a repeater and this setup has worked very well for me, but has some security limitations because the equipment is getting "technologically old". Buffalo also makes a nice repeater kit that is reliable and is more secure than my Linksys repeater setup.
2) A wireless bridge can be made between the building and basement using external antenna's. This is the probably "preferred" system, but is more expensive. Radiolabs.com has a nice wireless, line-of-site bridge kit built around two Buffalo WHR-HP-G54's. I think that it's around $359 and probably will be slight overkill considering the small distance, but it would be surefire and could be run at over 54Mb/s which is nice if you are moving a lot of data around, as well as simultaneously sharing internet.
A couple of things to keep in mind is whether you will let your router serve out IP's or whether you will use internet connection sharing or the like on your desktop. Both have pluses and minuses.
Security needs to be established immediately, especially if you live around population. Staying with the same brand equipment has a lot of advantages in both maximizing security and providing for ease of setup. Secuity-wise, WPA is far superior to WEP and is not easily hacked. I'm stuck with WEP because i've got too much mismatched stuff running together. However since I live right next to the "ends of the Earth", I'm not really too concerned about war-drivers with WEP cracking software running around.
There are a lot of good internet sources of information on setting up this stuff and it would be worthwhile to spend a couple of nights researching before you buy anything. None of this stuff is rocket science, but it does take more effort than standard old hard-wire networking.
Good luck,
Diet
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wireless internet? shed,distance etc
