Advice on creating small net?

Greetings-

Hoping the list can offer some advice or pointers to info for the appropriate 
set-up for my friends situation. Apologies if I'm OT here...

My buddy just bought a house across the street from his workplace, a commute of 
about 100 feet (lucky #^$*&#). He's hoping to use the DSL connection at his 
office from his home via wireless connection. He almost has line of sight, were 
it not for a good-sized leafy tree in his front yard between his office window 
and living room window of his house. He picked up a Linksys WRT54G, which on 
it's own is just able to get a weak signal to the front window of his house, 
but if he moves his laptop anywhere but that front window, (or if it rains/gets 
windy/etc.), he loses contact. He then picked up a cantenna from the the folks 
at contenna.com, which seems to improve the signal enough so that he gets a 
nice signal in his window, and a passable signal in the rest of the front room, 
but not so much in the rest of the house.

Sooo...I'm thinking he'll want to place a second AP for his front window, to 
rebroadcast the signal throughout his house, but I'm not sure if A)the WRT54G 
supports this sort of thing, and B)If it does, will any old AP do for the 
second unit, or should it be a matching WRT54G? He has access to a Dell 
TrueMobile 2300, which seems to support both bridging and repeater modes, but I 
was unable to find a clearcut means to make the two speak to one another. Also, 
while his immediate goal is to just be able to access the web, check e-mail, 
etc., I suspect that he may eventually want to be able to VPN into the Win2K 
network at his office, so support for that would be a nice bonus.

Can folks on the list make any suggestions for the second access point, or 
perhaps some other option (like a second cantenna?) to get him to the happy 
surfing place? Advice on both hardware and setup is greatly appreciated.

TIA!
-Robert-

P.S. Not sure if it's a factor, but the office window closest to his house is a 
few feet from the point were the electric/phone/etc cabling comes into the 
building...would this cluster of wire potentially affect the AP's ability to 
get a signal across the street?

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