Basement floods again

I cannot believe it, but our basement has flooded for the sixth time since our home was built not even four years ago. I am sick over this and very angry at our builder (Richmond American Homes). This was our dream home and it has become a nightmare living here. Once again, Steve and I had to haul out the kids toys (the basement is their play room), mop up all of the water and dry everything out. Steve had put all of the towels and blankets outside to dry out and, as luck would have it, we got a big rain last night and are now being treated to wind gusts of 60 mph. This morning I had to run all over the yard and collect the towels and bring them inside. I'm washing my third load.

I do not understand why this keeps occurring. We do not live in a flood plain. We complained to our builder (Richmond American) after our Big Flood on Mother's Day last year when we lost all of our Berber carpeting and padding, our bathroom tile, hundreds of dollars worth of Suzi Homemaker inventory and most of the kids' toys. Of course, they said they were sorry for our loss, but not their problem since our warranty expired two years prior. We have a sump pump and a hung sewer. Richmond American encouraged us to use their insurance company when we financed the house. The mortgage company neglected to tell us of a little clause that stated sump pump failure was not included with our policy--we had to purchase extra insurance to cover that. Now, don't you think had we been made aware of that clause when we purchased our insurance that we would have purchased the additional coverage since we have not one, but TWO PUMPS?

The house flooded once before we moved in, twice while we were under warranty and now three additional times since we've been on our own. Can anyone think of a reason why this keeps happening other than that Richmond American built us a substandard, overpriced home?

I did a little research this morning (which I wish we would have done prior to building with Richmond American), apparently there are MANY other dissatisfied Richmond American home buyers out there, with issues ranging from flooding, to mold, to improperly installed roofing tiles, to the builder's failure to properly install passive radon removal systems, to improperly installed floor joists (this resulted in a bathtub falling through a ceiling), ... the list goes on and on and on. These are homeowners from around the country.

I need to move on to a happier topic--Sophie's birthday and all of the wonderful trappings that go with that. But I will leave you with a link to check out. Please do research on your builder before buying a new home. I wish we had--it would have saved us a lot of grief and money.