BLACKSBURG -- The hamster and the gerbil came early to Pam Stolte's house.

It was the strongest sign that something was really going to happen at her friend's little house nearby on Ardmore Street in Blacksburg.

The Stoltes planned all along to take Chewy the hamster and Scratch the gerbil if home improvement hottie Ty Pennington and crew of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" showed up Sunday morning to whisk Carol Crawford Smith off on a vacation while her house was demolished and rebuilt in seven days.

But a producer told the family, including Smith's two sons, Hunter and Garland, to hand over the animals to the Stoltes on Saturday. If the Smiths were chosen, he said, there wouldn't be time to transfer the critters the next day.

Even after the animals departed, Smith repeated to herself and others that nothing could be taken for granted. The thing she'd been up nights wishing for might not happen.

For the past two years, the "Extreme Makeover" crew has traveled the nation building new houses for needy families, each project taking no more than a week. It's now one of the 10 most popular shows in the country.

To keep the show interesting for viewers and the community, the production crew insists on complete secrecy until the day the star designers roll in on a big bus.

Building Specialists of Roanoke, the general contractor in charge of tearing down and rebuilding Smith's house, dubbed it "Project 316" and swore employees at about 100 companies to secrecy before asking them for large donations of materials and staff.

All of them kept quiet, to the relief of Building Specialists President Bob Fetzer.

"The threat was always that if anything got out, it would be canceled," he said Monday.

ABC also approached most of the neighbors surrounding the Smith house in the weeks leading up to the final announcement, telling them to be ready if Smith was picked and swearing them to secrecy.

Pam Stolte, rodents in hand on Saturday night, had strong suspicions that Smith would get a new, more accessible house that would make her life with multiple sclerosis easier.

Meanwhile, building official Cathy Cook and other town employees had for weeks been skulking around, waiting for Smith to leave her house so they could conduct covert inspections of the site for building permits and plan reviews.

And they arranged to be at her dance studio on Draper Road when she wasn't, to look over that space.

Producers aren't talking much about what they plan to do at the studio. But the town has approved plans for some major work there, Cook said.

While it was hard to keep the secret for several weeks, Cook said it made her feel good to be able to help the family and do something new.

"It's exciting. You know, we typically see the same things over and over again," Cook said.

And the project is extreme. The crew, including all sorts of skilled craftspeople and inexperienced volunteers, have less than a week to build a 2,700-square-foot house, while also making an hour-long TV show.

The construction job would normally take six to eight months, Fetzer said.

On Monday temperatures dropped and it started snowing with several inches' accumulation forecast.

"It just keeps getting more and more dramatic. What else can they throw at us?" Fetzer said, chuckling.

Cook and the town's other building inspector will be on call 24 hours a day to do spot inspections. Town fire and rescue vehicles will also be on site during the construction.

The town has allowed the crew to block sections of Grissom Lane and most of Ardmore Street from traffic during the project. The area will be lighted 24 hours per day, every day until construction is complete.

Spectators angling for a view of the show's stars will also line the streets to watch the filming.

K.C. St. Clair lives a block away from the Smiths. Asked if she minded the inconvenience of closed streets, construction noise and lights, she said: "Are you kidding? How often does something like this happen?"