Almost all consumer routers let you turn off the "router" parts, in reality just turn off dhcp and don't use the uplink port. If they support dd wrt or similar even better as you can easily do virtual APs and VLANs.
That said I used Aruba IAP 225s in my house, scored two Lucent branded ones for $160 on eBay once so I put one upstairs on one end of the house and one downstairs on the other. Easily covers my decent sized house and the backyard as well. They support mesh, but I wired them to the network and power them with PoE.
ETA: I use an Intel Atom based half depth 1U SuperMicro case and board to run PFSense, pulls about ~10W for my router and I have multiple 24p Dell switches, upstairs and downstairs are linked via 10g fiber... And another 24 port on my server rack in the "crawl" basement room off the garage... Did 4-6 runs to all the rooms, all the CCTV IP cameras, then servers with extra ports for BMCs, mostly filled the switches up although utilization is pretty low.
Commercial APs are rarely about range though, usually more about density. Considering how poorly 5 GHz penetrates, this doesn't bother me too much. Ubiquiti seems to be an exception from reviews although I've never owned anything from them.