in progress Home stretch before going live - home page needs

Right now, the text formatting of the home page is all over the place. Looking for the classes and the files to twiddle. I would prefer not to have to create custom classes, but will if necessary. I am happy to make the changes using the ACP but it's not clear to me where things really are. I really do try to find them.

Screenshot #1 (top) - Forum

I want to tighten up the space above the Forum title. From the Chrome equivalent of Firebug it looks like it might be in index.css under .p5 - but .p5 appears to be padding-left.

I want to add a couple of pixels to the line spacing to the excerpt from the post. All of the text after the title (which is h3) appears to be in normal and the only place I see that class is in text.css, though it's inside a parent div blog-index-text? Changing the line height there from 12px to 14px didn't make any visible difference. However, doing it in the live editor makes the change I want. (Screenshot #2)

I also want to increase the space between the images. Again, I can do in the live editor but when I make the change in the CSS file and FTP it up there is no visible change when I refresh the page. I am in developer mode so I am not caching on the server and I am doing a hard reload of the page.

Screenshot #3

The line size and spacing in the Activity box for the item text is different from everything except Upcoming Events - size and spacing across things need to be the same.

In the Latest Profiles section the image size is smaller than in Groups and Events. I would like it to be the same size as the other two and the size of the name text the same as Groups and Events.

In Groups the Group name and description have different spacings from the image. ??

Finally, in Events, the description text is much larger than the description text for Groups - it appears to be the same size as Activity.

I am happy to do all the work - but I am at a total loss when it comes to finding the actual classes in the actual CSS files where the formatting is being done ... and understanding the inheritance relationship.
updated by @claygordon: 03/12/15 08:59:36AM

Okay - Some Progress.

It turns out that padding above the Post Title is handled in the template itself, not in the CSS. Same for the line height. First ones down.

More Progress - again in index.tpl, not in the CSS. Manual override.

Padding bottom to images in Latest Forum Posts - adds needed whitespace. Edited truncate of title length for more chars.

Fixed space to the left of the Recent Active Groups Name - removed no break space. (???)

Slowly, slowly ...