A significant part of The Notebook is the renovation of the Windsor Plantation home. It’s the crucial crux of the movie – Noah Calhoun promises to restore the Windsor Plantation home for Allie Hamilton as a gesture of his love. It’s the Windsor Plantation, fully renovated to Allie’s exact specifications, that makes Allie realize that Noah still loves her and wants to be with her.

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However, the exact renovations may not be something you’ve thought about yourself. How did Noah create such a beautiful home? What would he have had to do to manifest this building? Here are the nine steps Noah had to take so he could create the perfect home for his love.

1. Blue Shutters

The most obvious thing about the home is that the home as a whole is white, with bright blue shutters. This is something Allie specifically notes that she wants in the home. However, this paint job is only the first step, and it’s one of the less labor-intensive steps that Noah undertakes in his lifelong goal to turn the house into Allie’s dream home.

2. Switching Up the Porch

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In the original home, there were two porches: a second-story porch and a decrepit third-story porch. In the movie, Noah hitches his pickup truck to the second-story porch and tears it off the house entirely, leaving the columns on the front of the house completely uninterrupted. From there, he was able to rebuild the third-story porch. This higher deck allows for incredible water views and makes the front of the home seem more open.

3. Safer Central Staircase

The central staircase is already a crucial part of the home when Noah and Allie look into it the first time they visit. From the main entrance, the central staircase showcases the foyer almost immediately. Noah mentions that the previous owner had proposed to his wife on these steps, which is one of the reasons that he renovates them to make them safe for walking.

4. Front Room Dining Room

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There are two front rooms in the original Windsor Plantation home, and one of them becomes the dining room after the renovations. The first time Noah and Allie visit the home, it has a piano and a blanket on the floor, but it’s covered in cobwebs and completely neglected. After the renovations, the piano has remained, but everything else has become updated, with a handmade dining table to round out the dining room.

5. Porch Swing

The side of the porch includes a porch swing. After Noah and Allie reunite, the two of them sit on the porch swing, with Noah reading to Allie on the gentle summer evening. There’s a side door which leads to the kitchen. Although the kitchen is never explicitly shown on-screen, Allie cleans up dishes and watches out the kitchen window to see Noah and Martha saying good-bye.

6. Painting Room

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Allie expresses her desire for a painting room, which is why Noah gives Allie the painting room on the top floor. The window is high enough to overlook the water, and when  Allie first walks into the room, there’s an easel set up with a canvas. On-screen, when she looks out of the house, there’s a covered porch with circular columns, where she goes outside and paints.

7. Master Bedroom

The master bedroom is also upstairs, providing a balance to the painting room. Noah and Allie are able to spend a night together after the renovation, and when she wakes up, Noah has left a series of arrows on the floor. As she follows them, they direct her to the painting room. After leaving the bedroom, Allie runs down the hallway and to the left to get to the painting room, showcasing that the bedroom and the painting room are on opposite sides of the home.

8. General Structural Renovations

Possibly the most intense changes to the house would be the general structural renovations that Noah would have had to do for the home to make it livable and generally safe. The home hadn’t been touched for years, which means that it was easy to see cracked walls, tilting windows, a leaning chimney, and generally unsafe wood all throughout the home. Plus, because the home was very close to the water, it may have been flooded at some point. To make it livable, Noah would have had to add a new roof, replace electrical systems, add and replace plumbing, stabilize the chimney, level the foundation to ensure the doors and windows don’t stick, refinish the floor, and add a full coat of paint.

9. Landscaping

The entirety of the home was overgrown and untidy when Noah first discovered it as the Windsor Plantation home. However, he was able to update the landscaping around the home. That means cleaning up overgrown brambles and fallen trees, mowing the lawn, possibly adding sod around the home, and even planting new trees. While it makes the home look even more beautiful, it’ll also be a great way to prevent foundational damage and roof problems from fallen tree limbs in the future.

Conclusion

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The house from The Notebook is beautiful, and there’s certainly no denying that. While the home is gorgeous, however, the movie was also filmed at multiple different locations. That means there are some architectural discrepancies for many of the rooms – the painting room, for example, looks out at a covered porch with circular columns, which isn’t present in any other shots that the audience gets to see of the home. That means there’s certainly some “movie magic” happening here.

However, despite that movie magic making sure that filming was easier for the actors, the home itself, especially when accounting for what it would look like as a single structure, is something that’s beautiful to look at both on-screen and offscreen. If you want to learn more about the house from The Notebook, click here to read more. There might be some artistic liberties necessary to present a gorgeous picture all in one, but every viewer can attest that the end result is great.