A balance of time and money

Our family built our current house last year and took some steps to make it more energy efficient. We used 2x6" framing for the walls to increase the amount of insulation that would be installed. We used recycled fiber insulation. We bought the highest quality windows we could afford. We installed a wood burning fireplace to take advantage of woods on our back acreage on the coldest winter days. Finally we are heating our home with geo-thermal energy. Even though there is an abundance of groundwater here, it did seem strange at first to learn we would pump water out of the ground and into our "furnace" where the heat exchanger does some magic and pulls the heat from the water to heat the air, then pumps the water back into the ground again. It seemed like we should use the water that gets pumped back into the ground for something--watering the garden perhaps. However, it's not getting wasted. It is just being "borrowed" from the ground and then returned a short time later. There are so many other things we could have put into the house to make it "greener"--flooring from renewable resources, using reclaimed lumber, low VOC paint, and a number of other things. However, I think it's important to have a bit of balance--in this case the balance for for the cost of the home! We had to decide what was most important to us and spend the money there. That's the conclusion I am coming to in this journey: Decide what is most important to me and see if it fits into the balance of our lives, both with time and money.