Need very, very, basic 3 column to start design with

Hi, I’m trying to implement a design that has a 3 column layout. I am new to WordPress but not to CSS or HTML. It was suggested that I start with a theme as a sort of template and adjust to fit my design. I’ve tried about 6 themes and every time I get stuck with a huge load of extra CSS that I don’t need and I can’t ever get the 3 column to layout like I want. I thought I found one with “elements-of-seo” theme but it ends up it uses a home.php and an index.php and when I edited one the whole thing went hay wire. Should I just start making pages from scratch? Then it seems like it’s going to be a bunch of work to figure out how to get the whole database working. Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
~peter