Buy hosting from someone. Heart internet are good, and have an easy wordpress install. Trawl through http://themeforest.net/ or one of the other theme sites or search free wordpress themes to find a theme which is as close to what you want as possible. Then install it on your wordpress site. Change it around if you understand a bit of code and hey presto.
I found that by the time I'd pissed around doing a bit of coding to get a wordpress site to look right I could have written my own from scratch anyway.I know a lot of people swear by it though, but I also no a lot of the people who swear by it also spend a lot of time they don't talk about fixing various problems with it.
Basically I felt it was too reliant on various plugins to do anything nonstandard (i.e. have a site that doesn't look identical to everyone else that uses wordpress), and thus reliant on the developers of those plugins to make sure that they still worked with whatever the latest version of wordpress was.
And that's another thing, the frequent updates to wordpress were a pain to install (and I'm IT savvy and not an idiot) to the extent I just gave up trying to install them in the end.
What exactly are you trying to achieve with it Monolith, you mention de-blogifying it but why? Quite a lot of sites use Wordpress as a CMS, not just a typical blog but at the end of the day you might be better off using something different.
Inasmuch as I can gather, you can't get access to the underlying HTML structure which is something that I would like access to for a couple of power geek friends to have a handle on intermittently.
I do like this grid format but I wonder if I can remove the reference to it being a template designed by Billy Blogs at the bottom left of the landing page (probably not).
Are you familiar with the difference between hosted Wordpress, i.e. wordpress.com and the self-hosted alternative,
I created my first theme via this theme generator. Fairly simple, but it was a good place to start.