Entranceway Uh-Oh

Welp, turns out I made quite a mess in the entranceway.  I take about 90% responsibility.  The other 10% falls on Lowes for selling us ceramic tiles that were all broken on the corners once I pulled off the paper wrapping holding them together.

The entranceway is made up of parque (spelling?!) 4x4 squares that attach up to the carpet and to the entrance into the front living room (Just to get a sense of where the location is in the house, from the 1st picture in the living room post, I am standing in the entranceway taking a picture into the front room).  A few months back, I was curious if the hard-wood floor was still in-tact under the parque, so I made a mess and ripped up a few tiles.  This was how guests entered for a while.....oops.

But happily, the hardwood is still there under all the glue gunk that held the parque to the ground.  Yippee!!   .......or so I thought.

Then my first tile popped going towards the front door and MUCH to my dismay.....no more wood floor.  It's a nasty sticky white sheet on top of sub-floor.  Considering that the parque was not in this pattern, we believe that they had either linoleum or some sort of pattern design in the entrance when they built it, but then added parque later (why they added the parque all the way out til past the entrance into the front room is still a mystery.....or why they added awful parque at all is the BIGGER mystery, but I digress). 

We came up with an easy enough solution though.  We would just lay down ceramic tiles up until we hit the hardwoods.  It hasn't been said before, but we are eventually going to rip up all the carpet in the hallway to expose the hardwood floors through the house again.  Great solution until we got them home and cracked (no pun intended) open the boxes only to find that EVERY. SINGLE. TILE. was broken.  This tile below is one of the excessive breaks, most were just small breaks in the corners.  But still, SUCH a pain!

This is how it sits currently.  Poor little entranceway.  I hope to work on this soon, although Terry is saying we may need to just sand and stain the wood floors first...and if that's the case it's going to be a while!  Whomp whomp.