Hi Everett, I'd like to help, but you really need to keep the discussion to the forums as I am not available for private help.
To give you a little more detail, what you want to do is set a background image in your head.tpl and one in your bottom.tpl. That will take care of the top and bottom pieces. You may need to use a wrapper <div> tag around the tables that are there, as the background images don't work as effectively in a table. For the main body, if you look at customer/home.tpl, you'll notice that the main central area is basically a table. If you wrap that with a <div> tag and then create a 1px high jpg or .gif that spans the whole width of your display area, you can tile that as a background in the <div> to give you the left and right borders.
Alternatively, you could create two additional table cells, one on each side of the main area, and put a tiling image in there to create those borders.
Hope that helps!