Strong Pools 33X56 and Confused

I bought a house that already had a pool and had sat in foreclosure for 2.5 years. I found the paperwork for it and double checked with Watsons's, they pulled the invoice and is shows the pool is a Strong Pools Colosseum Riser 33x56 (supposed to be a 54 with at 2in riser) installed by them in July of 2004. So while it was in foreclosure the pool over flowed along with the porch gutters causing a lot of cove and pool floor washout. After many talks with many pool service companies they said it could not be repaired without draining it and then installing a new liner after the repairs.

I was confused why if I have a 56in pool that I would only have a water depth of 45in when the water is in the middle of the skimmer like it should be. So I drained the pool and cut a piece out of the liner to see what I had going on. I found that there was a cove of about 1in if any at all and that the sand is 4.5in deep. The sand is very soft (noticed even when it was full of of water that the bottom was soft enough to easily make dents in it with my foot and I can clearly see now with it drained that the bottom is covered in dents). The sand was also pretty moist which I would not have expected, also I notice a lot of ants. So after I scooped away the 4.5in of sand in one spot I found a very hard packed base of crushed limestone. Measuring from the lime stone (which I confirmed is the bottom of piece that the pool wall sits in) to the top of the pool wall is right at 54in. The liner that is currently in the pool is a uni-bead but for some reason the bead receiver was not used. I can only guess what has been done, but I suspect that the liner was changed by the homeowner and they wanted it to be more shallow so they added sand, didn't build a cove and didn't pack the sand, causing the washout to be even worse.

I plan to fix all the washout with packed crushed limestone then add sand back on top of it then tamp all of it. I know I am supposed to only have 2in of sand and I am thinking that maybe all this sand is causing the bottom to stay soft, so I have considered removing 2.5in of sand. As for the ants I have bought some ant bait to hopefully kill the colony.

When is comes to replacing the liner the deck makes it next to impossible to remove the top rails so my idea was to cut the liner where you would normally tear the J-hook off thereby removing the bead but leaving the j-hook over the wall then install my new liner using the bead receiver.
My reason for posting here is
1. to make sure all my plans are OK and that I'm not missing anything
2. I think I need a 52 liner if I left the sand and a 54 if I remove the 2 - 2.5.
3. I have been looking online to purchase a liner and wanted to know if there are some places that people here recommend.

On a side note I will be installing a bottom drain to reduce vacuuming and assist with chemical distribution. This is my first post so thank you in advance for helping out a new pool owner. I have attached a line to the pics of the pool since that might help.

http://s942.photobucket.com/albums/a...athanc03/pool/