Reconverting the attic is not a simple job. It can be a lengthy undertaking, particularly when the building in question is Leinster House, Miriam Lord.
They are installing a new Upper House down Kildare Street way. All this week, the place is like a building site, with half-completed Senators propping up the walls and the rubble of eliminated candidates littering the corridors.
There are optimists and pessimists among the various Seanad contractors. Some fear they won't have enough votes to finish the job. Others reckon, if they just get a good run at it, they'll be warming a seat in the chamber by September.
Installing an Upper House is not the same thing as throwing up a few oul deputies in a couple of days and announcing that you have a brand new Dáil. The Lower House is at the lower end of the scale: cheap and cheerful and ready for occupancy in jig time. It fits the bill for 166 deputies, from 43 constituencies, elected by all the citizens of the State. The common people.
The Seanad, on the other hand, has notions.
A manageable 49 senators are chosen by two anointed groups in Irish society: graduates of the more posh, old school, third-level institutions; and serving TDs, Senators and county councillors.
Accordingly, the business of installing the Upper House cannot be rushed. Unlike the Dáil - all readymade curtains and laminated floors - we're talking bidets, granite worktops and soft furnishings of the quality Celia Larkin would purchase when doing up a house in Drumcondra.
In the time it is taking to complete the Seanad this week, three lots of Dáils could have been constructed.
But the job is dragging on - so much time to elect so few.
It's to do with ensuring that the highest standards are enforced. De Valera himself put the formula for choosing our Upper House into place. To this end, the Seanad is scrupulously fair to itself in the course of the Seanad count. In their determination to be absolutely fair, count officials in Leinster House are just short of taking out slide rules when applying fractions of votes to candidates' totals.
Ironically, fairness doesn't seem a problem where the actual election is concerned, with a huge swathe of the adult voting, thinking, taxpaying population excluded from taking part in the exercise.
Seanad Éireann has the same attitude to non-graduates and non-elected representatives as the Catholic Church has to women priests: get stuffed.
But for the foreseeable future, the nation is stuck with this Leinster House parade of the potentially successful, the previously successful and the perfectly satisfied.
The count for the vocational panels, chosen by politicians, has been taking place in the Members' Restaurant. Yesterday, nine seats in the Industrial and Commercial panel were up for grabs.
In Seanad counts, the tally people sit down, because the process goes on forever. There were 37 candidates, with just over a thousand people eligible to vote. To ease the count process, each single vote was equated to a thousand votes.
The results of each count went up on screens around the room, unintelligible to all but the initiated. Ivor Callely polled 13,000 on the screen. In reality, he only got 13 votes. However, this being an election count with notions, he wasn't eliminated until the 13th count.
Some candidates got no first preference votes. Never mind. For some obscure reason, their second preferences were counted.
Fianna Fáil's Luke Moriarty, who tried to butter up councillors by including vouchers for a weekend away in one of his establishments, got six votes. Eliminated.
In the Upper House, which is far more salubrious than the Dáil, they have inside panels and outside panels. This means candidates are nominated by insiders - members of the Oireachtas, and by outsiders - pre-ordained nominating bodies. An insider might poll more than an outsider, and vice-versa, but a fixed number of people must be drawn from each group.
Take Tuesday night, where the count continued until three in the morning. Fianna Fáil's Ann Ormonde won a seat, even though there was a candidate above her with 20 more votes. But he was an outsider, while Ann is an insider, and her grouping had the last remaining slot.
On the same night, Fianna Fáil's Ned O'Sullivan was elected with an eighth of a vote more than his nearest rival.
Prof Stephen Hawking would be hard pressed to explain the finer points of Seanad elections.
They're daft.
By 3pm yesterday afternoon, the Industrial and Commercial panel had returned two Senators - Labour's Dominic Hannigan and FF's Marc McSharry. We were on count 10. The staff were in the process of distributing the 10 votes secured by Fine Gael's John Bailey. It was taking time.
"We were here until half past two yesterday morning, gasping for a cup of tea," said a member of the Fine Gael tally team. "Nothing. In the national parliament. And people had travelled up from the country for the count. Disgraceful."
They should travel up again when all this daftness is over and the restaurant is given back to the diners. The Mixed Grill Leinster House is particularly nice. And if there are people at adjoining tables that they think they should recognise, but don't, never mind.
That'll be the Senators.