OK I made some progress you can create a page called front-page.php and then switch WP to read the home page (that will load front-page.php)

This link was quite useful: https://developer.wordpress.org/files/2014/10/Screenshot-2019-01-23-00.20.04.png

I am new to this so I am struggling with trying to set up a blank homepage that I would be able to use custom post types in but have my own template... I followed the wordpress tutorial and that went fine. However, instead of displaying the latest posts on the homepage I wanted it to be blank with just a header and footer so I can use Toolset views to display what I want. So I switched the reading settings to the homepage, but I see the homepage as a post (without a working link). So the index.php page is being display instead of the homepage even though I have that set. To be honest what I am trying to achieve is a blank page site with header and footer so I can use Toolset CPT's, but also use MDBoostrap and your beautiful CSS

I changed this is in single.php and did not activate the side-bar option as in the tutorial:

enter code here <!--Grid column-->
            <!--changed this from md-8 to md-12 to make fuller width -->
            <div class="col-md-12 mb-4">