Front page with a series of posts and an excerpt from a page

Hi there,

I’m trying to get a nice front page for a site up and running which will have the most recent four or five posts (on the left), and will also display content from one of the pages (on the right, along with other stuff – logo, sidebar, footer, etc).

I spent a couple of fruitless days trying to do double loops and multiple loops in order get this to work. It didn’t work.

Is there any easy way to do this, or any plugin that can do it?

Thanks.