That was the problem - I had not updated my style. Thanks jhauswirth.

Thanks Gaieus, I will check out the tutorial. I did check and uncheck the background box in the styles tab and it did not fix the problem.

I'm not sure about what you are suggesting - could you clarify?

Yes I did update my scenes. Eventually it worked in the layout file after updating and saving them about 10 times. But the issue reappeared when I exported the pdf. I had saved my layout file before I tried to export also.

I was working with an architectural drawing and had saved scenes for the plan and sections. For the plan view, I had the section display turned on so that I could see where the section was being cut, but then turned it off for the section scenes so that they would not be grayed out. However, when I sent the model to layout, the sections were grayed like the section display was on. Also, I had set the background color and turned off the sky and ground colors in my model, but in layout the background showed up as the default blue and brown colors. After going back to sketchup several times and re-saving, eventually it showed up correctly in layout. I did nothing different than I had done before, just repeated the same action until it came out right. But then, when I went to export the layout file, the grayed sections and default background showed up in the pdf. I tried exporting it as a jpeg also and the same result. I ended up screen grabbing each page and creating a new layout file with tiffs instead of using the program as it is intended which was really frustrating.