Bayou Teche Museum Executive Director Marcia Patout and board member Mark Boyancé get the lemonade ready for the museum’s 10th anniversary event Saturday morning.

It was a busy day for the Bayou Teche Museum Saturday as volunteers and staff prepared to welcome guests to celebrate the museum’s 10th anniversary.

Eva Clement, her daughter, Mia, and friend Izabelle Cahanin were there early, doing a walk-through of the exhibits and visiting the museum’s new “Doc” Voorhies wing, which is still under construction.

“I haven’t been here in more than a year, so I thought it would be fun to drop by,” Eva Clement said as the two girls helped themselves to cookies and lemonade in the new space. “It is really looking nice.”

Executive Director Marcia Patout was busy getting the refreshments set up between welcoming guests, giving them an idea of what the new space would eventually look like.

“That’s going to be stairs going to the second floor,” she said, pointing out some blue painter’s tape on the freshly cured concrete floor. “We were going to put in a monitor, but now it looks like there will be a video wall for presentations and classes. And over there, that will be a door leading to the other side of the museum.”

The first phase of work on the building, “the ugly part,” Patout said, is almost done.

“Now we start on the pretty part, getting it ready to open,” she said, pointing out a spot where the museum’s planned Kathleen Babineaux Blanco exhibit will be set.

Currently, the museum is exhibiting “Saga of the Acadians,” a 15-painting collection of New Iberia artist George Rodrigue’s original works.

Local attorney Bill Repaske and his wife, Debbie, were also on hand to take in the exhibits Saturday.

“I really like the Rodrigue studio exhibit,” she said. “And the new space is really coming along. This is the first time I think I have been inside in 10 years.”

Patout said that the space will be enlarged as well, taking out the back wall of the new wing and extending it back along Serret Alley to the property line at Burke Street.

“It looks like a big space, but when you start putting things in it it gets small fast,” she said.

The museum was the 1992 brain child of Becky Schexnayder Owens and Paul Schexnayder. With the guidance of the late Alfred “Smitty” Landry, the doors finally opened 18 years later, in 2010.

The museum hosts a permanent collection of artifacts and memorabilia from the region, telling the story of a growing New Iberia, its people, culture and industry all centered around the serpentine curves of the Bayou Teche.