Water Treatment Planning

So I'm in the planning stage of a major upgrade and I'm thinking about my water treatment and storage system.  I don't want to set up the tank until I have a plan for this...at very least an auto top-off.  I need to design a system that's going to handle my water from tap to tank filtering, water storage, water changes, and auto top-off.  To add another wrinkle to this scenario, the water system will likely be located in my basement and my tank on the main level.  Has anyone else done the multi-level configuration and has it worked well or been a disaster?  All this in mind, I don't know if this means that I should keep my sump and skimmer in the basement too or if I should keep it in the cabinet of the main tank.  Finally, I want all this to be flexible enough so that when the time comes to add the additional dosing stuff for cal, alk, mag, etc. that I can do so without running into extra complexity.
On the tank tour, I saw a number of complex setups for doing this, but I gotta be honest, I was taking in as much as I could and most/all of this part of things just flew over my head.  I saw everything from garbage cans and rubbermaid containers to graduated liquid storage containers.  If there is a guide to this that I could read, please point me in that direction and I'll do the research.  I would appreciate the advise and direction of some of you more advanced reefers. 
Thanks in advance!
--AJ

 

Yeah, I like the idea of keeping the sump in the basement...I can see a number of benefits like cooling (basement is always cooler than main level), a degree of flood protection (if something were to overflow, it would likely be the sump and not the main tank), less noise from extra equipment, and I would have more space that I could work with. All that being said, I also have some concerns with that scenario. 1) Falling water...how much noise would be created from the water dropping that far? (I really don't know if this is a concern or not...still pretty new) 2) I have not seen anyone else who has a configuration like this. I don't know what kinds of issues I would encounter. 3) If I were to add a controller (let's say to the basement since that's where the sump and future components would be), would I be able to get remote outlets to the other part of the setup for controlling things like main lights, moon lights, powerheads, etc. I've looked on RC and I really have not found any kind of a doc or forum that does a good job of answering these questions. Thoughts?