I've Screwed Up My Main Drive Disk Permissions!

Hi All,

I'm fairly useless on OS X, but anyway, I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro running 10.9.5, and I just changed my Home Folder disk permissions, thinking it would stop Finder requesting a dang password every time I wanted to delete a simple file! It didn't help. Was still requesting password for any file deleting. Anyway, so I thought I'd go up a level and try it on my Macintosh HD drive. Big mistake. Now no apps respond at all. What I did was I right clicked on the Macintosh HD logo, and selected "Get Info", then scrolled right to the bottom of that Get Info thing, and unlocked the padlock. I then clicked on the cogwheel and hit "Apply To Enclosed Items". Took ages to finish, but of course now nothing works as a result. I've tried resetting the drive's disk permissions in Disk Utility, and it did loads of fixes, but no change - still, no apps open or at least report error messages when they try to start, before terminating.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated, thank you.