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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Aberdeen and across the UK. Scottish projects are planned as complete residencies, fully surveyed, agreed and priced before we travel.
Nearly four decades of specialist work sits behind every project: installation, refurbishment, sanding and sealing, court marking, slip testing and planned maintenance, all delivered in-house. Our clients are institutions and operators rather than households, and private homes are handled by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Distance changes logistics rather than standards. Everything is established in advance: scope, specification, programme, access, power and the handover date, so the crew arrives able to work rather than to investigate.
All machinery and materials travel with them, contingency stock included. Nothing is left part-finished pending a return trip, and the price quoted is the price paid.
Higher education sport combines demanding performance requirements with heavy timetabled use, and vacation windows that cannot be extended.
We plan against the academic calendar, phase larger facilities so part remains available, and provide the documented handover, testing results and maintenance schedule that estates departments need for their records.
Buildings in colder, wetter regions face two specific issues: heating cycles that move timber more than usual, and entrance areas taking a constant load of water and grit.
We set expansion allowances with that movement in mind, advise on humidity control where a hall swings widely between seasons, and pay particular attention to entrance zones during specification and slip testing.
The main sports hall at Liskeard Leisure Centre had taken years of public sessions, club blocks and league nights. We delivered a complete programme of sanding, re-lining and resealing, returning the hall to service looking like a new installation.
It is a fair illustration of how we handle leisure work: one tight programme, agreed dates, and a centre back in action on schedule.
~ Matthew Evans
An outstanding company to deal with and they couldn’t have been better to work with. St George’s Ascot now has a stunning new sports hall floor and we are delighted. From quote, support, delivery and after sales, the Team has been brilliant. Thank you. 
~ James Anderson
Dance floors have requirements that pull against those of a sports hall, and specifying one as though it were the other produces a room nobody is happy with.
Grip is the first difference. Dancers need a surface that allows controlled slide, particularly for turns, while still being safe to land on. A finish specified purely for basketball grip will be too grabby, and injuries follow from a foot that stops when the body does not.
Resilience is the second. Dance involves repeated jumping and landing, often in the same spot, and a sprung floor is not a luxury in a studio used seriously. Where a studio sits above other rooms, that same resilience needs to work acoustically as well.
Surface choice varies with the discipline. Ballet and contemporary generally want a vinyl performance surface over a sprung base. Tap and musical theatre want timber. Multi purpose studios need a compromise, and it is worth being honest about which discipline gets priority rather than pretending one floor suits everything equally.
Most sports floors are replaced later and more expensively than they needed to be, because nobody was watching them.
An inspection is a short, structured visit that produces a written report on the state of the floor: the finish, the markings, the boards, the structure beneath, moisture readings, the remaining wear layer and anything that needs attention now rather than later. It comes with photographs and a rough cost against each recommendation.
That document does two useful things. It tells a business manager or an operations lead what is coming, so a floor appears in a budget rather than as an emergency. And it creates a record over time, so you can see whether a problem is stable or getting worse.
For organisations with several floors it is the single most valuable thing we do, because it converts an unpredictable estate risk into a plannable one. Discovering in July that a hall cannot open in September is the situation everybody wants to avoid, and it is entirely avoidable.
If a sports floor fails early, moisture is usually the reason, and it is the thing we test for before anything else.
Water reaches a timber floor from three directions. From below, through a slab with no effective damp proof membrane or one that has been compromised. From above, through roof leaks, radiator failures and over wet cleaning. And from the air, where a building swings between damp and dry and the timber moves with it.
The symptoms differ. Boards that cup, with edges lifting higher than centres, generally mean moisture from below or a spill. Boards that dome or lift in the middle of the hall usually mean the floor has expanded with nowhere to go, often because perimeter gaps have closed. Gaps that open every winter are a humidity swing rather than a fault.
Sealing over a wet floor guarantees failure, which is why we take readings rather than assume. Where a slab is giving off moisture we install a mitigation membrane before laying, and where the cause is a leak we will tell you to fix the building first.
Squash courts are small rooms with a very particular wear pattern, and they need their own specification rather than being treated as miniature sports halls.
The traffic concentrates at the T, where players return after every shot, so a court can look fine at the front and back while the centre has been polished smooth. That polished band is both unpleasant to play on and a genuine injury risk.
The finish is the critical decision. World Squash guidance calls for a light coloured, matt floor with high slip resistance, and a gloss finish on a squash court plays like ice once the first film of dust settles. We sand to the correct degree of openness and use matt high grip systems, because sanding too fine polishes the timber before the seal even goes on.
Court markings are red, 50 millimetres wide, and applied between coats so they survive. Because each court is a separate room we can work through a block one or two at a time, keeping the rest of the club playable.
The sports floors we are asked to look at in Aberdeen fall into three broad groups, and each brings its own constraints.
The first is university and college facilities, where the buildings are busy year round and the summer is filled with conferences and external hire rather than standing empty. That narrows the window and makes accurate programming essential.
The second is the council leisure estate and the community sports centres attached to it, where booking income makes a two week closure genuinely expensive. Most of that work happens overnight or across a quiet fortnight agreed months in advance.
The third is school sports halls, where the calendar is fixed and the hall has to be back for the first day of term whatever else happens.
Because we are travelling a distance to reach Aberdeen, we plan the work in solid blocks rather than short visits, bring everything we need with us, and staff the job so it finishes inside the window rather than stretching. In practice that makes distant projects more tightly planned than local ones, not less. It also means it is worth talking to us early if you have more than one floor, because two or three jobs booked together are considerably better value than one at a time.
When a facility in Aberdeen asks what we have done that resembles their building, the closest comparisons are usually our university and leisure projects rather than anything defined by geography.
The sports hall refinish at Aston University is the one we point to most for campus facilities. A heavily booked hall, no long summer shutdown because conference and external hire fill the gap, a narrow fixed window, and the floor handed back on the agreed date with markings set out fresh from governing body dimensions rather than copied from the faded originals.
For leisure operators, Medina Leisure Centre is the closer parallel. There the constraint was booking income, so the programme was built around the centre timetable and the noisy operations were sequenced for the quietest hours, with sealed dust extraction keeping the rest of the building usable throughout.
Both illustrate the same point. On a distant project the technical work is routine; what earns the job is planning the window properly and holding the date.
Court markings wear out long before the floor underneath them does, and recognising that is what saves facilities a great deal of money.
A timber sports floor might run eight to ten years between full refinishes. The markings on it, particularly in a netball centre third or a basketball key, can look tired in half that. If the seal is still sound and still gripping properly, replacing the whole finish because the lines have faded is an expensive way to solve a cheap problem.
The test we apply at survey is simple. If the lacquer is intact across the floor and only the markings have gone, you need relining. If the lacquer has worn through to bare timber in the traffic lanes, you need a refinish and the markings come as part of it. Somewhere between the two, a screen and recoat with fresh line marking usually gives the best value.
We will tell you which of the three your hall needs, and we would far rather quote the cheaper option and see you again in five years than sell a full sand nobody needed.
Three things drive the figure: hall size, the amount of preparation the existing surface needs, and whether the sub-floor requires attention. All three are established at survey, after which the quotation is fixed. We do not price from a distance and then revise once work starts.
We cover the entire area and beyond. Our projects have taken us across the UK and internationally, and the planning method is the same wherever the building happens to be.
We carry the insurance and documentation institutional clients require, work to CDM where applicable, and provide method statements and risk assessments as standard.
We stop, tell you, and price the options before proceeding. Nothing gets sealed over and no additional work happens without your agreement in writing.
We recommend products suited to your floor and local water, and run a cleaning demonstration for your own team. Most of the work between our visits is theirs, so getting the routine right matters.
A well maintained hall wants a light screen and recoat every two to three years and a full sand roughly every ten. Sticking to that keeps the boards alive far longer, because every full sand removes timber permanently.
Yes. On timber the reliable method is sanding, which removes them completely. Most halls carry markings for at least one sport nobody plays, and taking them off is the cheapest improvement available.
Yes. We carry out pendulum slip resistance testing and provide the certificate, which is worth having on file for insurers, governing bodies and facilities audits.
Almost always polish or the wrong cleaning product building up, or a seal worn smooth in the traffic lanes. Both are fixable, and both should be dealt with before somebody is injured.
Yes, and we set out from measured dimensions rather than copying existing lines. Courts remarked by tracing the previous set drift over the years, and many halls turn out to be dimensionally out.
A typical hall takes one to two weeks from first machine to final coat, depending on size, how much board repair is needed and how many coats the seal requires. You get a day by day programme before we start.
Book a free survey of your floor in Aberdeen and we will tell you honestly what it needs, what it will cost and how quickly it can happen. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.