Having trouble with get_option and assignment

I posted this in the wrong section, I am reposting it in the appropriate section.

I am new to wordpress and PHP. I bought myself a theme that I have been trying to tweak. As of yet, the only thing I have been unable to figure out is why my homepage (and only my homepage) displays something to the effect of:

Warning: include(layouts/) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in freshnews/home.php on line 13

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘layouts/’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in reshnews/home.php on line 13

here is the problematic code (as far as I know)

<div id="centercol" class="grid_10">

		<?php if (get_option('woo_show_blog') == false) { ?>

		<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/featured.php'); ?>

		<?php

            $layout = get_option('woo_layout');

            include('layouts/'.$layout);

        ?>

        <?php } else { include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/stdblog.php'); } ?>

		</div><!--/centercol-->

line 13 is
include('layouts/'.$layout);

The only response I have been able to get is that the $layout variable is empty, so the assignment isn’t pulling anything. I have no idea how to remedy this.

Being so new, all my googling is aimless and fruitless. If someone can point me in the right direction, I would be infinitely grateful. If you need more information, let me know.