Read the Template Wrapper document on the Roots site and I’m a bit lost on the best way to do this. I don’t want to change the overall structure of the page template (i.e., the navbar and sidebar and footer,etc), I just want to change some facets of the way the content in the page is laid out. Take out some headers, put in some other stuff, etc. If I copy content-single.php to content-home.php and edit that, is that enough or are there other steps I would have to take? I’m trying to do this without reinventing the wheel.
i always make my front page by renaming page to frontpage.php and taking it from there/
I recommend copying page.php to front-page.php. Edit the second line of that file by changing 'page' to 'front-page'. Now in templates/ you can copy content-page.php into content-front-page.php and have at it. This is a more reliable structure for changing a static home page because, unlike your initial approach (which is a good attempt), this approach does not rely on the page title; it only depends on whether the page is set to be the Front Page in the admin settings, so you can change the title without worrying about breaking your template structure.
NB, content-single.php is the template for posts!