A day of research

Since Good Friday is a holiday here, Joern and I both had yesterday off. We decided to spend a good portion of the day working on the house. I organized a lot of my pictures and information into my binders. (I have a binder system, as suggested in Designing your Dream Home by Susan Lang.) My Inspiration Binder is growing and growing, as I collect pictures from the internet and magazines. I also have included in my inspiration binder those items that I would like to purchase, but have not done so yet.
I also sorted a lot of paperwork from our purchases into the proper binder- the Final Binder. This binder contains everything that is final for the house, like the contract for the kitchen, the paperwork for the appliances we have, receipts from furniture that we've purchased.
Joern delved into the many, many magazines we've collected over the years. His main project was to research our choice for heating. Although Joern has spent some time researching heating options, he hasn't really set aside time to really research. Yesterday was a great day to research. We started the process with the thought that we really wanted geothermal heat. We learned that geothermal would not be cost-effective, because you would need to drill at least 4 holes because our house is large. The drilling is quite pricey. Another problem we had with geothermal is that you are still dependent on electricity to run the pump, and solar panels to produce electricity are stil a bit too pricey as well.
Pretty much as soon as we gave up on geothermal, Joern decided for propane. Germans are a little concerned with propane, mostly because they're concerned about explosions. Both of our cars also run on propane now, and we're very happy with them. My father also has a propane dryer, and now a propane hot water heater installed. He is quite happy with propane. Joern has also become a convert. Propane is affordable, and while it is stil based on fossil fuels, it is clean burning, and more efficient than oil.
We are installing radiant floor heating, which will work well, since we can change out our heat source with little change to the floor heating.
Joern found his holy grail of home heaters yesterday- a propane powered air pump heater. Evdiently, they are huge in Japan, and have been around for over 15 years, but haven't quite made it to Germany yet. The good news with our decision is that we're installing the gas tank anyway, which we would need for the air pump as well.
As Joern crawled into bed last night after hours and hours of reading, he proudly annouced, "I feel propane is the best decision for us.!" Good boy!