You could use short codes on either of the homepage templates. I believe you can type content on the homepage and it will show up.

Otherwise you can edit the columns via editing the page template. It should be pretty simple by changing the 3 to 1.

Thanks for the quick response!

You're right, I clearly overlooked something there.

Quick follow-up, I think I may have confused myself because when using the shortcode 1/2, the 2 columns seem to be left-aligned and not taking up the entire content area. I did change the CSS to expand the content area, but I didn't change the shortcodes. Are they necessary to change or should they be based on percentage (ie. 50%, 33%, etc)?

UPDATE: I changed the CSS for the Column Layouts to the following values, which work for me now that I'm using a wider 650px layout.
.grid2column, .col_1_2 {width:48%; margin-right:15px; float:left; }
.grid3column, .col_1_3 {width:30%; margin-right:12px; float:left; }
.grid4column, .col_1_4 {width:22%; margin-right:10px; float:left;}