You mentioned lack of wifi signal reaching the love shack. I have had some success using a reflector to gain some distance in a particular direction, and you could even consider runnign them on both sides of your connection. A laptop typically wouldn't have an external antenna, but I use an external USB wifi adapter (free at a garage sale) so that I have an external antenna to use with the reflector.
EDIT - this is the one I used
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/index.html
