why thank you Jean Lemire, that was amazingly thoughtful. How did you get rid of everything under the intersection in scene 2? Sketchup refused to see the half sphere as anything but one fixed entity for me?

and sketchymick i actually wasn't aware that that option was even available, that i could just delete the excess around my circle.... thank you both!

okay. refer to the first 3 images.
i originally wants like this little idyllic hill. So i created a semisphere (and i learned how here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ICHizei6M fast-forward to 0:38) but it seemed too steep. I wanted my little creations to be able to have picnics on that thing. So originally I wanted to cut off a part of my dome so i'd have the less-steep tip left- i placed the part I wanted off under the plane for the sake of demonstration.
I still don't know how to cut the rest of that dome off, but I realized I didn't have to- the scale option allowed me to make the dome less steep, just by pulling the little green box right above the dome's tip and pulling it down. Yes, yes, you're very welcome for sharing this bit of genius. End results in last 2 pics

oh god, it's actually pretty embarrassingly bad this time! alright i might, for the sake of the community and all

i started answering my own stupid questions before any of the rest of you have to!!

omg so subliminally i know what i'm doing! that's a bit comforting. thanks all :3

ah lol dave you already picked up this problem on my other question thread before i did- i actually did sit down and remodel the house (to some degree) and gave the walls thickness but they still show through? As you can see in the photo the lines showing through the roof (which also now has width) look thicker from afar since they're actually showing the rectangles of the tops of the walls! But if i zoom in on the houses these lines disappear at least.

And TIG, do you mean i should use layers in order to hide things when i'm not working on them? and what do you mean by walls 'sticking'? and (not called a noob for nothing) what are raw elements

yea i wanted to do that but i have a deadline that's already deadly close.
i've already decided to wing it and do whatever, but for the sake of conversation- if you look at the image i wanted the house to fill in the space between the street and the edges (in front of it and between the two houses) by making it a rhombus instead of having extra space around it by just rotating the houses. i'm going to turn that extra space around into a front yard but yea is there anything i could've done other than just remodeling?
also thank you for the replies, everyone here really is helpful

When I connect the walls to the ceiling, for instance, on the outside it looks like there are holes in that roof on the outside. Ik i should pull the roof and the walls up so there will only be 'holes' on the inner layer of the walls but is there any other way to cover these up?

Okay as far as I know scaling just makes it bigger or smaller and distorts the shape a bit but it doesn't actually change the shape itself?

The thing is, I need my building to look diagonally, and just rotating the building leaves way too much free space around, especially if I have to scale the building down so as not to let two diagonals of the building that will touch the streets' edges.

I really don't know if I'm wording my question wrong but I've tried to find an answer by myself on google and found nothing.

I've made a villa with a rectangular base. I want to skew the building so it has a rhombus as a base instead. Is there any way for me to pull the buildings walls or something so I can get that result?