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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Bedfordshire and across the UK. We work across the county on school, community and leisure facilities, frequently on halls serving several purposes.
Our clients are schools, academy trusts, universities, leisure operators, councils and clubs, and have been since 1987. We cover the full lifecycle of a floor with our own team rather than a chain of subcontractors. Private homes are outside our scope and are served by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Court marking paint is a technical product, not decorating paint. It has to bond to a sealed sports surface, survive constant foot traffic, resist cleaning chemicals, and crucially maintain the same friction as the floor around it.
A line with different grip from the surrounding surface is a hazard precisely where players plant and turn. We use specialist proprietary systems applied between coats of seal, so markings sit within the finish rather than on top of it.
Marking one sport is straightforward. Marking five so each remains legible at speed is a design exercise. The method is hierarchy: establish which sport leads, mark it so it reads instantly, then work the others in behind using colour and line weight.
Sports sharing similar court runs are deliberately separated by colour, and where a hall hosts competitive fixtures the relevant court is marked to the current governing body specification rather than an older one.
Timetables change, and new sports arrive. Adding a court to an existing floor is usually straightforward, provided the layout has room and the colour palette has not already been exhausted.
Removing old lines completely is harder: on timber it requires sanding, on synthetic surfaces it is more limited. We will explain honestly what can be achieved without a full refurbishment and plan the new layout to work with what is already there.
The sports hall at St George’s had a Granwood block floor that decades of use had left dull and tired. Granwood cannot be sanded like timber, so we restored it correctly: careful preparation, a modified epoxy coating system and crisp new markings.
The school kept a serviceable floor out of a skip and spent a fraction of what replacement would have cost.
~ 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
Badminton is unforgiving about dimensions because the service courts are small and an error of a few centimetres changes where a shuttle lands.
A doubles court is 13.4 by 6.1 metres, narrowing to 5.18 metres for singles, with the short service line 1.98 metres from the net. We set out from those numbers rather than from the lines already on your floor, because a great many halls carry badminton courts that were laid slightly out decades ago and have been faithfully copied at every remark since. If your courts have always felt cramped at the back, that is usually why.
In a multi court hall the critical dimension is the separation between courts. Too tight and players from adjacent courts collide chasing wide shots. Where a hall is genuinely too narrow we will say that three courts laid out correctly beats four laid out badly.
Badminton lines are conventionally white or yellow, chosen to read clearly against everything else already on the floor.
Five a side is one of the most heavily played indoor sports in the country and one of the least carefully marked, largely because it is usually added to a hall as an afterthought.
The pitch itself is simple: a rectangle with a halfway line, centre circle and two penalty areas. What causes trouble is that the markings run across the full hall and therefore cross every other sport already on the floor. A five a side line laid in a colour close to the badminton or netball markings turns a busy hall into a puzzle.
We treat it as part of the marking hierarchy rather than an addition. If five a side is played constantly, it deserves a clear colour and proper visual weight. If it is occasional, it should sit back so the sports played more often read first.
The other frequent request is rebound boards or wall padding interfacing with the floor, and those fixings need setting flush and making good properly rather than being sealed around.
A school crest or club badge at centre court is one of the few things that genuinely lifts a hall for a modest cost, and it is far cheaper done during a refinish than as a separate visit.
Logos are painted from your own artwork between coats of seal, so they sit under the final lacquer and wear at exactly the same rate as the floor around them. Anything applied over a finished floor will scuff and peel within a season, whatever the supplier claims about it.
We work the artwork up to the correct scale for the circle or the area it is going into, and we show you a layout before anything goes down. Colours are matched to your own brand rather than approximated.
Coloured keys and zoned areas work the same way and have the same effect. A hall with a filled key in a contrasting colour reads instantly and looks designed rather than institutional, and it costs very little on top of work already underway.
Volleyball and indoor cricket both turn up regularly in school and leisure halls, and both have marking requirements that are routinely got wrong.
A volleyball court is eighteen metres by nine, with an attack line three metres from the centre on each side. The detail most often missed is that the court needs proper free zone around it, and in a hall that is already tight the sensible answer is often to mark one court properly rather than two badly.
Volleyball also relies on floor sockets for the net posts, and those have to finish flush and stay watertight. During a refinish we lift the covers, clean out the accumulated debris and reset them to the new floor level rather than sealing over them and leaving a raised ring.
Indoor cricket is marked less consistently, and it is worth agreeing exactly what is required before setting out, because club and school formats differ. Ball rebound off the surface matters here more than in most hall sports, which makes the condition of the floor as relevant as the lines on it.
Most of what we are asked to do in Bedfordshire comes from school and academy trust estates, with leisure operators and community halls making up the rest.
Trust work is the pattern we see most. A trust holding eight or fifteen schools has that many sports halls, usually built decades apart and in wildly differing condition, and almost never a single record of what state they are in. That is exactly the situation where a condition survey across the estate pays for itself, because it turns an unpredictable cost into a phased programme.
Individual school halls come to us for the usual reasons: a finish that has worn through in the traffic lanes, markings nobody can read, or a hall that has become slippery and is now an insurance concern rather than an inconvenience.
Leisure centre work is generally about keeping the doors open, which means overnight and weekend working rather than a fortnight closed.
Community and village halls are the fourth group, and those tend to be committee decisions with money that has been raised rather than budgeted. We quote those by element so they can be phased if the funds require it.
Most Bedfordshire enquiries arrive as a symptom rather than a specification, and there are three that come up repeatedly.
The first is a hall that has become slippery. In almost every case the cause is either polish build up from the wrong cleaning product or a seal worn smooth in the busiest routes. Both are fixable, and both are worth dealing with before an incident rather than after, because it becomes an insurance question very quickly.
The second is markings that no longer make sense. Halls in the county frequently carry lines for four or five sports, several of which are no longer taught, laid down in colours that merge under the LED lighting most schools have since fitted. Rationalising those is cheap and transforms how a hall reads.
The third is trust estates discovering that several halls need work in the same year. That is the situation a phased programme exists to prevent, and it starts with surveying all of them rather than the one that shouted loudest.
We quote fixed prices after a free survey rather than estimates over the phone. The main variables are the size of the floor, how much preparation it needs and whether repairs or sub-floor work are required. All of it is itemised in writing.
Comprehensively. We have delivered projects from Cornwall to the north of Scotland, and the approach does not change: survey, agree, price, then complete the work in a single visit.
A single-court hall is typically four to five days including sanding, repairs, sealing, marking and curing, which fits inside a school holiday. The programme and a fixed reopening date are confirmed in writing before we start.
Yes. Plans typically cover an annual deep clean from four pounds fifty per square metre, condition inspections, recoating, repairs, relining and slip testing with written reports.
Yes, and it usually costs less. We survey the estate together, apply one specification and schedule the sites into a single programme with one point of contact.
The blocks and boards themselves are not the concern, but bitumen adhesive beds used before the mid nineteen eighties can contain it. We treat every bitumen bedded floor as suspect until testing confirms otherwise.
Yes, and for multi site clients it usually should be. We build rolling programmes that spread the spend and take each hall out of use at the quietest point in its own calendar.
Surface marks and worn lacquer come out easily. Deep water staining and anything soaked into open timber may remain faintly visible, and we will tell you honestly at survey what to expect.
It depends on board thickness and how much has already been removed. A solid strip floor might take six to eight full sands across its life. We measure the remaining wear layer at survey.
An area elastic floor deflects across a wide area when loaded, which suits ball sports. A point elastic floor deflects only where loaded, which suits fitness and dance. Combined systems provide both.
Because we survey properly we usually know what is coming and allow for it in the quotation as expected work rather than presenting it later as an extra. Genuinely unforeseeable finds are rare.
Book a free survey of your floor in Bedfordshire 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.