Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Josh Duhamel’s heart rate “drops about 25%” when he’s at his rural retreat.
The 53-year-old actor – who has Axl, 12, with ex-wife Fergie and Shepherd, two, and Rocca, six weeks, with wife Audra Mari – has a house in Los Angeles but largely lives in Fargo, North Dakota , with his family, though he feels truly relaxed and at home at his cabin in the woods of Minnesota.
Speaking to Dana Carvey and David Spade on their Fly on the Wall podcast, he said: “What I think I love the most about it is I just get out there and my heart rate drops about 25%.
“My priorities change too. I feel like I have purpose.
“I’m always working on something where I don’t even mow my own lawn here. It’s just absolute freedom out there.”
The Transformers actor bought the land almost 17 years ago and has slowly built up the property, which didn’t initially have any basic amenities.
He said: “I bought like a little half a parcel for 12 acres for like nothing. And then the other half of that parcel went up for sale.
“Then I had then 26 acres with a little shack of a cabin with no electricity, no water, but it was a cabin.
“It was a structure. I got a cabin. I’m not going to sleep there with the rats or the mice or the raccoons. And then the one next to that went up for sale.”
Josh then got the next piece of land, on a lake, for “nothing”, and he developed a “passion” for working on the getaway pad.
He said: “I’ll tell you what I paid for it — $189,000 for 26 acres. The amount you can get there versus what you pay for it here is crazy. I’m not sure I would be able to get it for that now.
“But then all of a sudden, I had two little cabins and like 50 acres on this place and I never planned to do that. I just wanted something out there somewhere that I could just get away and go, you know, fish and stuff like that.
“It’s turned into like a whole passion of mine. I started moving dirt and I started shaping it.
“And we actually built a property. [Because] these cabins are so small, they’re just big enough for three people or family of three.”
The Shotgun Wedding actor’s property is now set up with independent, off-grid infrastructure for water, heating and electricity.
He said: “For the first few years, there was no water. There was no bathroom.
“We had electricity in the little cabin — the second one — but no water. So, we were like washing our dishes in the lake and it was like homesteading. But, I loved it. You know, it was like so different than anything I’d ever done before.
“We had to build wells. Each one of the cabins has a well.”
For other facilities, solar panels generate electricity and propane tanks help provide heating and power major appliances.
