Double gap between features

I'm customising my front page and I've disabled 'header highlight content'. This now means that I have a noticeably large white space between 'hero content' and 'portfolio' because it's effectively doubled the gap/padding. From what I gather, there's a gap/padding after 'hero' and apparently also a gap/padding before 'portfolio'. Instead, 'Header highlight content' didn't have any padding. So now I have a double gap which obviously this looks awful... can you please suggest how to fix this?