First, you need to do your detective work, find the problem and then figure out options as solutions. Your problem seems exceedingly simple compared to my house. If I understand right, water comes down a hill, pools and makes its way into the basement. I would think the solution would be to create a trench of sorts with perf pipe covered in landscape cloth. Grade so water from the hill and water from the house all make their way to that pipe. Cover the pipe with crushed stone. If this is your only problem, you're done. Have a professional do the grading.
Let me tell you about my wonderful house, what we've done and how it's fared.
Our house was built on a piece of land a bit over 13 acres. There are at least a dozen test holes where the builder attempted to find a place where the ground would perc. He couldn't find one. So he blasted the granite into a nice big granite cup, put in enough crushed stone to get the inspector to pass perc and built the house on top of it.
So there's problem one. If water gets under ground, it fills up this giant granite cup and pushes its way through our floor through micro cracks. Not a lot needs to come up, but high pressure water will continue to drip in until there's 2 inches, then 4 inches of water in the basement.
But there's more! The house was built without proper grading. So the entire south facing side of the house routes rain water along the house, gently down a hill, along a sidewalk, around to a basement walk in and into the basement. I'm not kidding, if I wanted to capture water, that's how I'd do it.
And let's look at where the house is. We're right next to a hill. You remember that blasting? Well, it's blasted into the hill a bit so there's some normal dirt and ground behind the house, but above that is granite ledge and more hill going up. So when it rains, water comes.......wait for it......down the hill. What a concept. Where does it land? Right at our foundation. Nice stopping point to soak in and get into that granite cup.
On top of that (and you thought I was done?), the north side of the house is a traditional New England Cape. That means that the drip edge is less than an inch beyond the exterior wall. At the base, we have 3 window wells. (Oh, that sounds cozy). Well, guess where water goes when it rains? Down the roof, right? And over the drip edge with some portion dripping into the window wells. You'd probably think "he's going to talk about that water getting into the granite cup again, I bet". Well.....NO! Because when it really rains, that water actually builds up and fills the window wells. Then it directly leaks through the edges of the windows directly into the basement. So a very heavy, short storm is enough to fill the well, drip in and all of a sudden, a quarter of the basement has water all over the floor.
How did we fix all of this mess? You might think that we took the leftover dynomite from blasting out the hole and blew the thing up. Nope. Although that would have been easier.
First, I built a small diversion gully of sorts that starts on the hill behind the house, making its way down the hill to the north side of the house, moving away and then out to the driveway, well downhill. This does a decent job of diverting surface water from the hill.
For the south side of the house, we had gutters put on that pull all the water to the back of the house, exiting into that gully created above. Some water still comes down part of the roof so we added another gutter on a porch roof on that side that drains to the sidewalk where I can add a plastic pipe to really divert it. We also put in a real sidewalk with pavers and diverted some of the water into the lawn.
For the north side of the house, we did a number of things. We did try gutters but the gutter people all seemed to be clowns and either a downpour or snow would destroy the gutters. Sigh. I also put those plastic domed covers over the window wells and that helped a LOT.
Now for the money.
Because water under the basement in that granite cup really could never be completely overcome because every spring, all the snow was going to melt and hold moisture and come under the house, we put in an interior, under slab diversion system with sump pump. Some things that absolutely differ here from the above recommendation. So the basement floor was jack hammered about 6 inches to the wall. Plastic channeling was installed with perferations at the top part to capture water. Not at the bottom half because we want the water to flow to the sump basin. This is all, of course angled so the water flows. Part of the system goes past our walk in door and in case we do get water built up outside that door, there's a garage grate there so it'll go right into the channel. All that feeds the sump basin with sump pump. The pump feeds a pipe that goes outside, under the porch, under the lawn, under the driveway and exits on the other side of the driveway, well downhill from the house. In the spring, when water gets under the house, the sump pump will run for minutes at a time, wait 5 minutes and run again minutes at a time. So there is still a lot of water under there. It's been in place now for about 5 years and has never been touched and has always worked fine. I have a couple submersible pumps from the before time so if there were a failure, I could throw one in while I go to the hardware store, Lowes or Home Depot to pick up a new pump (they're standard and inexpensive). One key difference here from above. There are no holes in the basin. In our case, holes would not make sense. When things go bad, that would introduce a lot of water into the basin directly. So long as the water is below the channels, it's below the floor, so it can stay there. To go lower could potentially mean we're moving the water table. That isn't reasonable.
There's one more thing we just did. We needed our roof replaced, so as part of the job, I asked that the north side of the house (cape with 1" of overhang) get a 1 foot extension of the roof and gutters properly installed. That was done in the fall.
We have not had water in the basement from under the floor since the sump system was installed. The water from the window wells hasn't been more than a small streak since putting in place the bubbles. We're into the winter and have had thaws and no water of any kind has been seen on any walls or anywhere on the floor.
Oh....and by the way. Our old roof had several spots where we had leaks and streaks. None so far.
