Oh dear! It sounds like the water wasn't too deep. And they would have to be sitting in water for quite a while before they start to warp. You may have dodged a bullet, and I do hope so! Good thing they were elevated somewhat. Besides the recommendation of tarps and plastic I'd recommend an old fashioned pallet to keep them up off the ground. Did you take them out of the packaging yet and wipe them down? Don't blame yourself for using the washer. On the other hand you think your contractor may have been using the laundry sink as a contracting garbage disposal???? Wow, that's something I'm sure you're going to follow up on. Wishing you the best.

Karen, Unless you are planning to hire a professional engineer/inspector, or waiting for results from your attorney, we need to identify exactly what went wrong since by all accounts with an effective perimeter drain and working sump pump, you should not have a water problem. Would have loved to help in person, unfortunately we relocated from NJ to WA a couple of years ago. From your pictures it appears water is seeping up through a possible gap between slab and basement walls. To answer your question why basement is also wet in the center; regular concrete is porous and moisture will wick upwards through it due to hydrostatic pressure and lack of effective installed counter measures; I said regular concrete because one can add expensive additives to minimize/eliminate concrete porosity; but we can still fix things. First check perimeter drain installation: Do you have visibility to where the perimeter drain exits into the inlet? In your case, especially with sump pump turned off, there should be water pouring out of the drain; if not, the drain may either be a) sloped incorrectly (may even be feeding water back into the drain b) has a break somewhere (like patriceny described) c) is installed much higher than bottom of footings d) has drain holes facing up. Perimeter drain should have drain holes facing down so water starts moving sooner than wait for it to rise above top of drain; you want the pipe to drain and not float. Additionally, a perimeter drain should be sleeved in fabric to prevent clogging drain holes (it takes time to clog drains hence an unlikely cause in your new construction) e) is a combination of one or more above issues Measures: 1. Have the drains scoped: Preferably, this should be done when the basement is wet, so that you can tell if the drain is actually draining water to the drain. Have one ten foot section on a longer wall or where feasible, excavated to bottom of footing level. I'm guessing but it is very likely you have issue (c) above. Top of perimeter drain 'should not' be higher than bottom of basement slab. Drain needs to be next to bottom of footing to be effective for draining water. If that is the case, you may have no choice but to have entire perimeter dug out to lower height of perimeter drain or correct one or more above issues. If drains 'appear' to be installed correctly and water is still not draining fast enough, there may be a break/leak which unfortunately means uncovering 8'-10' sections at a time to identify where it is crushed/broken. Not that anything can be done about it immediately but do ask the builder if he installed a vapor barrier (visqueen sheeting) before he poured the basement and what thickness it was 6mil, 10mil or thicker (very likely it is 6mil if at all installed, builders will not use anything thicker unless specifically asked. Other effective measures: #1 is install an interior french drain, at least 8" deep (twice your slab thickness) draining into sump pump pit #2 if no vapour barrier was installed, have a company use Pressurized injection of waterproofing material, such as polyurethane, via several drilled holes. #3 same as #2 above but have them seal joints between slab and walls. #4. Dig out sump pump pit, deepening it to effectively lower water collection level and taking water away from bottom of slab and walls. There are several other possible solutions but we need to establish root cause or causes first. Please keep us apprised of course of action you are or intend to take.

Water control is all about getting water away from the house. Your comments about final grading and the sump pump output pipe are correct - both of those will help direct water away from the house as will gutters and downspouts. We lived in the Midwest, land of the sump pump, for years and the worries of sump pump failure are valid. The sump pump ran very often in one house we lived in while neighbors' pumps almost never ran. (My assumption is a drain around the foundation must not have been working correctly.) Our sump pump back-up was a system linked to the incoming city water pressure so it ran even if we lost power. A plumber told me one time this type of system is inadequate and wanted to install a battery back-up system. Thankfully we never had to rely on a back-up. The fact that the construction supervisor responded to your email on a weekend and went to the house is encouraging - they care. My guess is when all water control processes are in place, you will be good. Just be sure that the sump pump and downspouts drain away/downhill from the house. In one of our houses the sump pump outlet was directed to a pipe that left the house horizontally, turned to the ground and went under the ground. Sounds like a good idea until we got a hard freeze. The water froze in the horizontal pipe and it had to be cut until it could be repaired in the spring. Rather than try to repair it, we just directed the water about 10 feet away from the house to where the yard sloped away.

Before I'd even consider putting in a French drain, I'd consider a couple of other options. First, do you have a rain gutter system on the rest of the house that carries the rooftop water away to one side of the house or the other to come down a downspout? If so, I wonder why this area was not included. And, if not, maybe that is an option---to just divert the water to go elsewhere so it isn't trapped within that bed surrounded by concrete. Secondly, keep in mind that over just the last 60 days, most of Oklahoma has had around 200% of our usual average rainfall and that is on top of having record rainfall for 6-8 months now across most of the state, so we're all seeing more standing water than usual. Most years are not like this. Third, check out the soil in that flower bed and see how it drains. The issue might not be how much water is sitting there---it might be that the soil is compacted and/or is slow-draining clay and drains poorly so the water sits on the surface for longer than you'd like. I'd work on adding some organic matter to that soil to see if I could improve drainage. In order to keep the soil grade below the concrete, you might need to dig out some of the existing soil and just replace it with a better growing medium that drains a bit better. If you're getting rain every other day or so like many of us here in OK have been, I'd watch it for a few more days and see how quickly that area drains if we ever manage to go for 4 or 5 days straight without rainfall. If you can get the drainage there to improve just by correcting the soil, then whatever plants you choose to put there should do fine in the future.