Hi Piotr,
Thanks for your reply! I didn't notice that you had replied until now so sorry for not getting back to you earlier. I managed to figure most of it out on my own but I'd like to know how to manually remove the style switcher options as when I disable it in template options, it remove the space I'd like to keep.
Regarding manually editing the theme's files, I'm also having a devil of a hard time figuring out how to remove the "gap" in between "Header" and "Top Widgets 1" (
http://i.imgur.com/noBeq0F.png - gap in between "Test" and "Remove". I thought removing the widget activated areas would remove the gap but then I realized there's a gap in between the actual widget activated areas. I'd like the picture slider to be as close to the top (under the menu) as possible