I attempted to flatten some of the faces but when I press space and type in flatten nothing comes up. Is there something I am missing?
Ah, good catch! I had used this so much that I thought it was default, but it looks like it's not. Go to your User Preferences > Addons, and enable Mesh: Loop Tools. That'll give you a handful of really useful commands when you press W in edit mode, and Flatten is one of them.