Wheat Bread 101 or How I Wasted Tons of Active Yeast and Wheat Flour

I spent no less than 3 days trying to bake the perfect loaf of wheat bread this week. I'm talking fluffy sandwich wheat, not dense brick loaf. I made four attempts before deciding that my last loaf was edible and not too offensive.
Here are the things I learned about baking wheat bread:
1.How to use yeast-Um, so this wasn't brand new to me, but I definitely used YouTube to look up a video on how to proof yeast.

Very informative, and I managed to not murder more than one packet of yeast.

2.No one uses just wheat flour in their bread-This is where the density of the bread can really go one way or the other. I thought I was being super healthy and awesome only using wheat flour. Yeah, if you want a heavy old doorstop that totally works.

The reason that this doesn't work out so well is that the bread needs the gluten found in the regular white flour to get that rise and fluff. Before you go all gung ho gluten free speech on me, don't. I don't have any gluten sensitivities and I don't feel the need to exclude it from my diet. That's why my new best friend is this stuff.

Vital wheat gluten is there to help give the bread more of the sandwich soft bread texture. It definitely helped with the density issue.

3.My awesome husband told me that a good bread dough should be sticky. Meaning, if it's dry and flaky like my batch #3 then it's back to the drawing board. 

While I did deem loaf #4 acceptable I'm not confident in it enough to share a recipe, but I'm gonna work on it! In my next attempt I'm going to substitute one cup of the wheat flour for a different type of flour. Do you have any suggestions for a different type? The recipe suggested potato flour but that is not sold in my regular grocery store.

Let me know any bread baking tips you have!

-Lindsey