Alexa PenaVega and Carlos PenaVega have traded island life for one in the country — in Nashville, that is.
“The community here has been unreal,” Alexa, 36, said on the Thursday, May 15, episode of Shawn Johnson East and husband Andrew East’s eponymous podcast. “We had [a] good community on Maui, but we hadn’t been back since the fire … and it was just too dangerous to go back.”
Alexa and Carlos, 35, moved their family of five — they share sons Ocean, 8, and Kingston, 5, and daughter Rio, 3 — to Hawaii in 2020.
“We basically got stuck there for two years,” Carlos recalled. “It was fine, but they were fining people for being on the beach. I was like, ‘Why can’t I just go there? Nobody’s there.’”
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According to the Big Time Rush singer, he and Alexa were “exhausted” of ways to stay entertained on the island. They then briefly lived with their kids on a multi-cabin sailboat.
“I started really, really watching [sailing videos on YouTube] and I was like, ‘We’re buying a boat and we’re getting out of here and we’re going to sail the world,’” Carlos recalled. “We ended up figuring out how to buy this catamaran, and we fixed it up for two years. We never left the dock.”
Alexa, Carlos and their kids lived on the boat full-time during the renovation process.
“We’ll never do that again,” Carlos quipped, noting the construction prices were “ridiculous” compared to ones for building a house on land. “It got to a point where it was, like, laughable. I was like, ‘OK, now we got to fix this.’”
He added, “We live on the boat, we continue fixing it — we never leave the dock, but it’s fun. You save money on taxes, but we’re still going back between Hawaii and Florida, and then the fires happen.”
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“She was right, obviously,” Carlos quipped. “One day, we were praying, and it felt like God was calling us to come check out Tennessee. We just go when God calls us, like, fast.”
Carlos and Alexa relocated to Nashville in early 2024, finding a property from his ex-girlfriend and current realtor, Cassie Long.
“She’s also a very good friend of mine,” Alexa chimed in. “We became friends when I was filming out here, but she’s still a great realtor.”
Now that Carlos and Alexa have officially moved houses, they are well into the decoration phase.
“New house = new layout = us constantly rearranging furniture until we figure it out,” he captioned a sponsored Instagram post on Thursday. “Thanks to @lovesac and their Sactionals, we actually can! Seriously, though — my brain needs the freedom to move things around all the time. Anyone else relate? 8 months later… and we might finally have a plan. Maybe.”
