This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website: Find out more.
Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Cambridgeshire and across the UK. Our work ranges from university and college facilities to fast-expanding academy estates, with moisture assessment central to almost all of it.
A family business established in 1987, working exclusively on commercial indoor sports and timber floors. We survey, install, restore, mark, test and maintain, keeping every stage in our own hands so one warranty covers the whole system. Domestic work is handled separately by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
A moisture reading is only useful if it is taken correctly and interpreted honestly. Surface readings alone tell you very little; what matters is relative humidity within the slab and what is happening beneath the floor covering over time.
We take readings at multiple points and depths as part of every survey, provide them in writing, and specify a barrier only where they genuinely demand one. Adding one unnecessarily is money wasted; omitting one where it is needed destroys the floor.
Timber moves with the seasons, and a floor laid without adequate expansion allowance will either gap in winter or buckle in summer. It is entirely predictable and entirely preventable.
We set expansion gaps according to the species, board width and the building environment, and advise on ventilation and humidity control where a hall swings widely between heating seasons. Most buckled floors we are called to were installed correctly in every respect except this one.
Higher education work has its own constraints: short vacation windows, facilities shared between departments and clubs, and estates teams who need documentation as much as they need the work done.
We plan around the academic calendar, phase larger projects so part of a facility stays available, and provide the documented handover, testing reports and maintenance schedules that estates records require.
At Medina Leisure Centre we refurbished the main sports hall floor completely: sanding, repairs, resealing and a full set of new markings, with the logistics planned down to the last detail so the centre lost as little bookable time as possible.
The after photographs show a hall transformed, and the programme finished on the date agreed at the outset.
~ 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
Community buildings ask more of a floor than almost anything else, because the same square metres take a toddler group, a badminton club, a parish meeting, a fitness class and a wedding reception in the same week.
The characteristic damage is scoring from chairs and tables going out and back constantly, rather than the concentrated wear a sports hall shows. That is good news, because fine scoring sands out easily and these floors usually have plenty of timber left.
The other characteristic is decades of polish. Many community halls have been polished for thirty years, and that build up has to be removed chemically before sanding or it clogs every abrasive. We allow for it rather than discovering it.
We quote these jobs by element so a committee can see exactly what each part costs and phase it across two years if the funds require. That transparency matters more here than anywhere, and it is why much of this work comes by recommendation from one committee to another.
Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement, laid in a bitumen bed, installed in thousands of British schools and halls from the nineteen thirties onwards. A great many are still down and still serviceable, which says a good deal about how well they were made.
It is not timber and it must not be treated as timber. There is no grain and no wear layer in the usual sense, and aggressive sanding takes block that cannot be put back. Bitumen softens with heat, so a machine held too long in one place draws adhesive up through the joints. Some older bitumen beds contain asbestos, and we treat every one as suspect until testing says otherwise.
Restoration means rebedding loose blocks, replacing those that have broken up, preparing the surface with appropriate abrasives, and coating with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates with the markings applied within the system.
Most Granwood floors described as beyond saving are not. We will tell you honestly which situation yours is in.
For a leisure operator, floor work is a revenue problem before it is a maintenance problem, and we programme accordingly.
Closing a sports hall stops booking income immediately, and members notice. So most of this work happens overnight or across quiet weeks, sequenced so the noisiest operations fall when the rest of the building is emptiest. Sealing at the end of a shift means the floor is walkable by opening.
Dust control matters more in a leisure centre than almost anywhere, because air handling is usually shared between spaces and a pool hall carries dust remarkably well. Sealed extraction and proper screening keep the rest of the building usable.
Operators running facilities on contract often have obligations about facility standards, which makes documented condition and slip resistance testing genuinely useful rather than administrative. We provide the certificates as a matter of course.
Where an operator holds several sites, a phased programme across the estate is almost always better value than site by site reaction.
The greenest sports floor is almost always the one already in the building, and that is worth saying plainly when so many are replaced unnecessarily.
A timber sports floor that is refinished rather than replaced avoids the manufacture and transport of an entire new floor, and it avoids sending the existing one to landfill. Given that a well built sprung floor can be refinished five or six times across its life, the difference over thirty years is substantial.
The coatings have improved too. Modern water based two pack systems have far lower solvent content than the finishes used twenty years ago, which matters for the people applying them and for the building afterwards. Low emission systems are available where a specification calls for them, and we will discuss the trade offs honestly, because the toughest finishes are not always the lowest emission ones.
Where a floor genuinely has to be replaced, timber remains a renewable material and the old boards can often be recovered rather than skipped.
Cambridgeshire work comes to us from three fairly distinct directions, and the flooring problems differ noticeably between them.
University and college sport is the first. These are year round facilities with no long summer shutdown, because the conference and summer school programme fills the gap, so the working window is narrow and fixed. We plan those jobs months ahead and staff them to finish inside the window rather than hoping.
School and academy halls are the second and the largest by number. We completed work at De Wint School in the county, and the pattern there is common across the region: a hall in constant curriculum use, a finish that had gone too long, and a fixed date to be back for term.
The third is the rural stock. The county has a very large number of village halls and church halls, many with timber floors laid a century ago that are still perfectly sound under decades of polish. Those restore for a fraction of what committees usually expect, and much of that work reaches us by recommendation from one hall to the next.
The project most often relevant to Cambridgeshire enquiries is De Wint School, which we completed in the wider region.
It is a fair illustration of the type we see across the county: a hall in constant curriculum use, a finish that had been left considerably longer than it should have been, and a fixed window with no flexibility at the end of it. The floor was sanded back to bare timber, damaged boards were cut out and replaced, and the hall was resealed with markings set out fresh from measured governing body dimensions rather than traced from the faded originals. Several redundant sets came off at the same time, which cost nothing while the floor was open and made the hall considerably clearer to use.
For collegiate and university facilities the closer parallel is Aston University, where the constraint was a year round timetable with no summer shutdown, solved by surveying early and staffing the job to finish inside the window.
When we reline a hall we set the court markings out to the dimensions the governing bodies actually publish, which is not always what is currently painted on the floor.
A netball court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with 50 millimetre lines, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game. A basketball court is 28 by 15 metres with the three point arc at 6.75 metres, and the restricted area is now a rectangle rather than the trapezoid still found in many older halls. Badminton is 13.4 by 6.1 metres for doubles, with the short service line 1.98 metres from the net.
Those figures matter because players move between venues. A court marked slightly out plays differently from every other court the same team uses, and nobody can ever quite say why. Relining from measured dimensions rather than tracing the old lines is what corrects it.
Where a hall is genuinely too small for a full size court, we scale it properly or mark a junior format rather than compressing a senior layout into a space that cannot hold it safely.
Cost is driven by area, condition and specification. Because we do not subcontract, there is no margin stacked on top of another contractor’s price, which is one reason our quotations tend to compare well. Everything is itemised so you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Yes, and we regularly work considerably further afield. Our quotations include travel and mobilisation openly rather than adding them later, so the figure you see is the figure you pay.
Yes. Boards are matched by species and grade so repairs blend into the finish rather than announcing themselves. It is one of the reasons we do repairs in-house.
A failed resilient layer or a batten that has lost contact beneath that area. It is a structural problem, so resurfacing will not fix it. We locate and repair the build-up underneath.
Yes. Our survey reports rank work by urgency so you can spread it across financial years, and we will say honestly what cannot safely wait.
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.
Yes, in advance and specific to the job rather than a generic template. We also supply COSHH sheets for every product, insurance certificates and DBS details for staff on school sites.
Light foot traffic is normally possible around twenty four hours after the final coat, and full use with equipment back at seventy two hours. We confirm exact times for the system used, because they vary.
Yes, routinely. A great deal of our leisure centre and university work is done overnight so the facility keeps trading. It costs a little more in labour and usually saves a great deal more in lost income.
Yes. Logos are painted from your own artwork between coats of seal so they wear with the floor rather than scuffing off. It costs least while the floor is already open for a refinish.
Constantly. Summer holidays and half terms are when most of our school work happens, and summer slots book up early. If you are planning for next year it is worth speaking to us in January rather than June.
Book a free survey of your floor in Cambridgeshire 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.