incorrect description

[dakarah]

Hello, I purchased an item that was listed as preowned, with pictures. In the pictures the shoes had no visible defect, but when I got the shoes they have black stains on the back where there were no stains in the pictures. The problem I have is the seller has all of his remaining items listed as buy it now or best offer in a time frame of 12 days 23 hours from now. I am assuming he has to check to see if he has buy it now winners, or if he has offers, so I am waiting for a response, but the question is...how long do I wait for a response before I have to file something with ebay? I want to make sure he sees the e-mail I sent before resorting to getting  ebay involved, but I also don't want time to run out on me before I can communicate with him. Once before I had a problem with an item I received being broken. (The box was so small that it was no wonder it was broken.) When I contacted her, she made it clear she didn't believe me, so I sent her pictures. I was a little angry because this was the thing my autistic son wanted most for Christmas, and it was the only one on ebay, and she broke it by mailing it in a box too small. To add insult to injury, she basically called me a liar. I e-mailed her and told her since she thought I was a liar that I would just file a dispute with ebay. She responded by insulting me further. She said I was unfair and greedy to not give her a chance to resolve the issue without ebay since she was new to ebay, and she desperately needed the income. I finally just agreed to ship the expensive item back to her and get a refund. It cost me over 20.00 to ship the item back to her, and then she asked me to be compassionate and give her time to refund the money as her elderly husband was in the hospital at the time, and she would refund in a couple of weeks. Of course I told her I would wait. Then she gave me excuse after excuse for why I had to wait longer until she finally just ended her account on ebay. (I now know she changed account name because I just recently found her by accidentally purchasing an item from her again under her new account name.) I do not want to be taken advantage of again, obviously, but  I do want my new seller to have an opportunity to fix our problem with the shoes. I just don't want to be stupid and wait too long to get a final resolution and lose out altogether. So how long can I wait for the new seller to contact me about the problem before I should file an item not as described report? I really want to be fair to the seller and assume he sent the wrong shoes. Thanks for any help you can give me, and I hope my question is not confusing.