Hi Cerial,
Welcome to Fieldlines.
I'm still in the process of doing as you want to do - using as much power as I can from my wind turbine.
It's as much art than science, so I'm happy to see you are aware that a bit of trial and error is needed.
I'll agree with what others said about insulating your basement (you're obviously losing a lot of heat that way, a common problem) and getting a more sturdy tower that's not attached to your house.
In answer to your specific question about the heating, you probably should get a WT with a 3-phase AC output, and size the resistance load to match the output specs of the turbine. Can't tell you what that will be until you tell us what turbine it will be. That will take some research on your part. Some quality time with Ohm's Law will give you the idea. For an effective heater, expect the resistor bank to be 3 cylinders sized between a rolling pin and a roll of paper towels, each. Getting a WT for 3-phase heating limits your options because many are built for battery-charge only or grid-tie only, though if you are willing to disassemble/modify the WT then you have a lot more choices. Knowing what is what will take some research. Taking the hint from the others who've already spoken, it's too soon to be making that decision.
One way to size up your problem is to convert your gas bills into kWhr as far as heating is concerned. If you have baseboard heaters and other heating things plugged in around the house, include them too. Don't cheat. Then decide how much of that you want to take care of with a WT. Select a WT that can do that. That's defines about 1/2 your budget. The other half is the insulation and tower as were mentioned.
Find the energy the WT can produce in the wind you actually have. The weather service reports are not a good guide. Wind energy that you can actually collect is not the same as what's theoretically possible. More research on your part. To understand this at my house, I installed a weather station.
For comparison, my homebuilt WT is 10' in diameter, is on a 70' tall tower, and delivers about 1000kWhr per year. It does not have a mechanical brake but I can stop it with an electric shorting switch. The tail folds up to turn it away from excessive wind. I started with an induction motor and modified it to mount Neo magnets on the rotor (like BigRock said). My winds are variable, seasonal, and often stormy. Last year I didn't see a single thunderstorm, but a few years before that I got multiple TS per week and even a couple of incipient tornado clouds.
You know, circling back to the basement - If you fixed it up into a nice cozy shop then it would be a much more pleasant place to work on your wind turbine projects, see?