The Greatest Project of Them All: Saving the Barn--a Sound Healing Rest Retreat that is a Sanctuary for People and Animals
- dawnsagonias
- Dec 27, 2025
- 3 min read
A Bat Infestation that required many hands, much machinery, and skilled operators to get ready for the sound healing rest retreat weekends.
Here are details on our renovation of the 3rd floor of the sound healing retreat barn; a project that has taken almost a year, required skilled hands, and loving care.
This project of excluding bats from above the ceiling of the 3rd floor of the barn was necessary to save the barn and to continue to host sound healing rest retreats for participants to breathe clean air, and to also be able to use the 3rd floor at some point!
I call this the "greatest project" so far (and there have been many projects!) that we've undertaken here at Inner Wolf Retreat Space because this project I couldn't do myself. We also had to rent a 40 foot lift, have a volunteer to run it, and clean out about 200 pounds of bat poop. We started working on the exclusion in February of 2025 (before the bats migrated back), and just now at the end of December 2025, we can finally begin to visualize the completion.
We Begin...
In February, we began with renting the 40-ft boom lift, and thankfully Stephen, an Inner Wolf resident, wanted to tackle the operation and scoping the perimeter of the roof of the barn for any holes the size of a nickel or larger that the bats could be squeezing in.
Now I'm not a bat hater; they've just been living under the ceiling of the 3rd floor for about 20 years I suspect, and one couldn't even enter the 3rd floor in the summer time for the smell. The bat guano was beginning to ruin the ceiling boards and dissolve nails and wiring! That's potent stuff! We did hang bat houses on the side of the barn to encourage them to live there instead of inside the barn. I love the bats. They keep the retreat free of mosquitos! Think about it, with that 200 plus pounds of bat guano, think about just how many mosquitos that would be!!!
We actually had a delay with the lift, because the first weekend we had hoped to use it, it sprang a leak and drained out nearly all of its hydraulic fluid...(that's the hydraulic fluid circled below)
Going Inside...
Spring arrived and we soon saw that Stephen's work was successful and that the bats were no longer lodging in the barn. He started tearing out the ceiling boards, which was a very hard undertaking due to the type of nails used.
A friend Eric arrived in June and needed a job to do, so he found a way to tear down the ceiling boards and then took down all of the urine and guano soaked insulation. Truly, he endured the worst part of this project, but we had him in PPE and a canister air mask. This is where we carried down over 200 pounds of bat poop. Some community members came and picked some up for use in gardens too!
As the bats were figuring out the new houses, we got to see some sweet little bat pups.
We made slow progress by coming back to the project whenever we could, in between sound healing rest retreat weekends, honeybee removals and relocations, firefly sound and light nights, and an all around busy summer.
Stay Tuned!
Stay tuned for the next blog that will showcase how we are hand-milling the boards for the new ceiling and what this 3rd floor will be used for in the 2026 Sound Healing Rest Retreats! (and you can find dates for the 2026 calendar HERE)
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