Color changes to specific areas of theme

Hello,
I have several questions that I wasn’t able to find answers for yet.

What I’ve done so far:
• created a child theme
• installed “simple-custom-css” and applied styles found throughout forum
• gone into “Design Settings” and changed “Customized Theme Colors” and “Menu Link Color”

What I need help with:
1) only the hover color for the menu has changed–neither the menu link colors nor the default light blue line under the menu and the “button” color behind the category name underneath posts are my new color. Can you tell me how to change all these?

2) this is all the css I have pasted into “custom.css”:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans);
body {font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif;}

.site-header {
border-left: 0px;
border-right: 0px;
border-top: 0px;
}

.site-header {
background-color: transparent;
}

.themonic-nav ul.nav-menu, .themonic-nav div.nav-menu > ul {
border-top: 0px;
}

body {
color: #5f574f;
}

a {
color: #e17000;
}
a:hover {
color: #5f574f;
}

.footer-widget .widget a {color:#e17000;}
.footer-widget .widget a:hover{color:#5f574f;}
.footer-widget .widget a:visited{color:#0a4153;}

.themonic-nav ul.nav-menu, .themonic-nav div.nav-menu ul {
background: #ede8c4;
}

.themonic-nav li ul li a {
background:#0a4153;
}
.themonic-nav li ul li a:hover {
background:#e17000;
}

footer[role=”contentinfo”] {
background: #ede8c4;
color: #5f574f;
}

.js .selectnav {
background: #0a4153;
}

a {
color: #e17000;
}

– but the link color on the front page has not changed, in body or footer, but has in posts

3) I changed the header background to transparent because I want to have my logo with trans background display “on top of” a horizontal tiling background image. How can I remove the white body background/border?

Thank you!