So, I decided to find a decided making a skin from scratch is alot of work (though I haven't ruled out doing it again), so I decided to find a sking I somewhat liked and tweak it alittle.
I found GlueBlur on a site ran by Michael Hodnick (thank you Mike) and went edited from there. Yes, it is quite orange. You can blame Jayson for that. he started talking about orange links, and I have this fixation problem. So now I have an orange site.
All joking aside, I am very happy with it so far. I will probably add a left side bar and move some of the widgets to the left side as the right side is pretty cluttered and there are still widgetish things I would like to add.
This seems to render well in IE 6, IE7 and Firefox, though there are alot of tables and whatnot I will probably want to remove and the skin doesn't fare well in XHTML validation, so there will be some time spent there.