I also have a tendency to stay away from the various CSS frameworks. Something that I find useful, however, is to come up with something of a basic template of your own to work off of.
Include a CSS Reset, such as one Eric Meyer's site: Reset Reloaded. An alternative (one I currently use, because I personally don't use most of the xhtml tags included in Eric's reset anyway) would be Tim Wright's Reseting Browser Defaults (reset.css)
And then try to come up with your own set of typographic styles, while thinking about such good things as Vertical Rhythm and whatnot. I find a (generally) good resource to be The Grid System, which has tutorials, articles, templates and the like, including some useful tools for coming up with a good typographic grid.
I would shy away from the CSS frameworks, simply because they are never very semantic, and the multitude of div tags really irks me.
