Visually comparing the different stages of a house's construction

I was just watching the tv show Grand Designs.  It's nice to see the development of a house from plans, through construction to the finished design.

One thing I find, though, is that it's always hard to connect the before and after.  You see the after shot and it's hard to remember what that spot looked like at different stages in the construction, and it made me think about how you make those details more apparent.

They could show the exact same shot -- with the camera in the exact same location, pointing in the exact same direction -- at different points in the house's development, starting with the empty site, when the foundations are up, when the wall frames are up, when the roof and walls are done, and when it's fully furnished.  They could run through them in chronological order, transitioning between them by fading the current one out and at the same time fading the next one in, so you could see a bit more of the relationship between the two.

Such a technique could also be employed on moving shots, such as a shot that sweeps across a room, or one that starts at one end of a long room, facing towards the other end of the room, and then moves towards the other end of the room.  As the camera moves along, the imagery could seamlessly progress between the different stages of the development.

And of course such techniques lend themselves to some sort of interactive presentation on a web-site.  (It makes me think of these interactive before-and-after photos of the recent Brisbane floods.)