This isn’t really an example, but a suggestion. Rather than reinvent the wheel, why not use a proven CSS layout and adapt it to your design? I think this can be done, and there are lots of sites with good basic layouts that you can use. My favorite is ruthsarian skidoo too 3 column layout. It can morph to 1 or 2 columns with just a couple lines of code. it takes care of the big structure issues, allowing you to focus on the details of the design.
What is needed is a CSS cookbook, or basically ‘patterns’ for CSS (patterns are an important part of logic programming).
I’m not a graphic designer, but I can implement designs in XHTML/CSS. See this latest example I did from PSD mock up. It uses ruthsarian skidoo too. As does my own freelance programming web site, eventhough the original design is from solucija.com. And if you look at the projects I’ve done, every one of them is ruthsarian layout (and pretty basic as far as design elements go).