Expert: Bruce E. Johnson - 1/20/2009

Question
I live in a house that is over a 100 years old. the problem that I have is I want to create a play area in my basement for my children. at ont point in time we had an over abundace of garder snakes in our home.(they were everywhere- upstairs on the main floor in the heat vents you name it they were there) but that is a whole nother story. I figure that they must have been crawling up out of the basement walls the tops of the bricks are not capped off with anything if you were to stand on a chair and drop a marble into the whole in the brick it would fall the 8 feet or so to the ground inside the bricks. I need to figure out how to close all these holes up so that I dont have anymore critters(as I call them) crawling out or anything else getting in or out! we have absoutely nothing in our basement right now and thats a lot of wasted space as we have 4 girls!  i hope not to spend a terrible huge ammount to fix this problem. it seems to be kinda drafty because of this too! I can also send a few pics. if that would help give an idea of what im talking about too. any help is appreciated!  thanks in advance!!
jodee

Answer
Hi jodee, that's strange that your foundation wall doesn't have a poured concrete cap on it.  Generally there is a bond beam of poured concrete or grout in masonry walls.  

To do it right would be to have a concrete or masonry contractor come in and pump concrete into the wall cavities and basically fill the wall with grout or concrete.  

To just cap the wall you can stuff a wad of newspaper into the cavities and leave the wad down about two to four inches and then fill that remaining two to  four inches with mortar mix or sacrete.

I hope this information helps feel free to write again regarding this or other matters, sincerely bruce e johnson..bejohnsonconsulting.com