Construction zones are ugly. Nobody complains about the new road once it opens.

Anything being rebuilt looks worse than it did before the work started. The middle of a change is all mess, noise and inconvenience, with none of the benefit visible yet. People judging you in that stretch are judging a site, not a result. Even you will forget the mess existed once the thing is working.

Expect the ugly phase and name how long you think it should last. Tell the people around you that the mess is temporary, so they stop reading it as decline. Keep going through the part where it looks worse, because that is the part where most projects get abandoned.