[jQuery] I'm stumped! How to accomplish this navigation rollover effect?

[jQuery] I'm stumped! How to accomplish this navigation rollover effect?


This is what the client wants:
http://commadelimited.com/uploads/rollover.jpg (text has been blurred
out intentionally)
The site is VERY basic: nav colum on left, content column on right.
The building it out is easy, but the nav is throwing me for a loop. My
original thought was that I could use animate to fly the wide bar out
to it's desired width. But now I realize that if I do that, my
container DIV will screw up my layout.
I'm thinking now that I could possible position each column absolutely
in a parent container and theoretically that would prevent the
animation from messing with anything else.
Does anyone else have any ideas?