House_1.skp (4.1 MB)
Hey! I’ve been trying to cut through this wall on a house I’m designing for school. I’ve been at this for a good two hours now with no luck. When I try to make a rectangle on this specific wall, SketchUp doesn’t detect it as on the same wall. I’ve included my file so you can better understand. I’m trying to push/pull the three rectangles that you’ll see outlined by guidelines. Thank you so much!
In this area, if you are trying to use the guidelines as guides for drawing your rectangles, the guides aren’t on the surface correctly so they will result in rectangles that aren’t on the surface either. Probably the best thing is to delete the guides and start over with them.
Unfortunately, I’ve tried this a few times with no luck. 
Another problem is that the interior wall is not vertical. If it was, the X-values would be the same for the four corners. They are close but not close enough.
The outside face is also not vertical.
You can fix the walls by moving the top edges so they align with the bottom ones. working in X-ray makes it easier to see what’s going on.
Okay, I’m starting to understand. What would be the best way to fix this?
See my edit, above.
You’re a lifesaver! One last thing. How are you seeing through the walls like that? Usually, I would press “K” but your view seems to be different.
You could use Back Edges instead. I switched to an X-ray style.
Alright so I tried your fix and it worked until a drew back my guidelines (which I’m only using because it was the way I was taught by my teacher) and tried push/pulling rectangles only to see the same problem from before.
Look at your screenshot, the bottom left shows the guide disappearing behind the face, so either the guide is wrong or the face is wrong.
I’ll try to record a video to show you my process.
I can’t see what I would be missing.
(google drive since the file was too large)
I am still having trouble with this, unfortunately. If anyone has a fix that would be great! 
pay close attention to the gif in post 13. use xray instead of back edges.
Draw the rectangle with the rectangle tool, more accurate.
Near the end of your animation, you seem to expect something that won’t happen: guides won’t cut a face, they just provide things you can snap other geometry to. You still have to draw the rectangle to start making the opening.
Also, as you struggle with in the animation, you should turn X-ray off immediately after getting the walls vertical. X-ray enables snapping to things that normally would be hidden, and that is why you had to work so hard. In his example, Dave turned on X-ray so that he could snap to corners inside the building while straightening the wall.
Finally, in your model you have a lot of copies of things spread out over a large distance from the origin. That can potentially aggravate loss of precision. It’s better to make components or groups and use tags/layers to control which are visible than to scatter contents all over the place.
I think Steve nailed it. Looks like you have no problem except 1. guides don’t create edges, they are just “guides”, so you don’t have a surface to push-pull. and 2. only use X-ray for seeing or snapping or selecting things behind the forward surfaces.
Whoops lol. That’s my bad. Even though I missed it in my animation, if I were to draw a rectangle there, I would have the same problem from before.
I asked my teacher (i’m a high school student btw) and he essentially had me re-build the outer wall which worked although the guidelines still seemed to through the wall. I’m now having the same problem on another wall in my house and am hoping that I don’t have to re-build every one of my outside walls.
