Re: In ground vinyl pool bottom finish quality
In my experience, perfectionism and pools tend to come together in pools over $100,000 -- but not always even there. Early in my pool career, I had some experience with owners of new pools, and I dreaded encountering them after a series of mistakes put them into what I called the "toothbrush and magnifying glass" mode. Basically what would happen was that, after 2 or 3 mistakes (the threshold varied), the customer would shift into suspicious 'inspection' mode. Since I've never seen a flawless pool, unhappiness for both customer and contractor inevitably follows that mode shift.
In your case, without knowing your local market and seeing your pool bottom, I can't judge whether the unevenness in your pool bottom rises to the level of a "significant flaw". I can tell you that, so long as it's not severe, it's not a functional flaw, and won't affect the life or usability of your pool.
But, the fact remains that for a majority of IN-ground pool purchasers, the appearance of the pool is as an important feature as its function. (This is reversed with AG pools -- AG pools are actually *used* far more than typical residential in-ground pools!) Anyhow, this focus on appearance is a bit of an issue, since most pool builders that I know are fairly rough-hewn folk, who, in their own lives, focus more on the function than the appearance. (They may make a bit of an exception, in the case of their truck, their hunting rifle, or their girlfriend, but it's still generally true.)
The educated artsy-type who are dedicated to building beautiful pools do exist, but they are uncommon, and tend to be involved only with pools well over $100,000. (Having worked on some of those pools, I can assure you that some of their perfectionism does NOT necessarily extend to creating well designed and built equipment rooms!)
So . . . you can post pictures, by uploading them to Webshots, Google Drive or Plus, Flickr, etc, and then linking to them. OR, you can email them to me at poolforum@gmail.com.
But . . . unless the unevenness is really bad, my guess is that any fix is likely to be at your expense. Even then, your contractor may not be capable of holding a truly level pool bottom -- I know I'm not. It's a manual skill that takes both talent and experience, and the sort of people who can do it, usually are capable of doing other manual work well. Since vinyl pool builders tend to value fast workers over meticulous ones, there's a real question whether there's any pool worker in your area capable of holding that kind of grade.
Good luck!
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