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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Cornwall and across the UK. We have delivered full sports hall refurbishments across the county, planned as complete programmes with fixed dates.
Since 1987 we have worked on indoor sports floors the length of the country and internationally. We remain family-run and deliberately specialist, covering installation through to long-term aftercare with our own team and machinery. We take no domestic work; Ryan’s Restorations covers that.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
The sequence matters as much as the workmanship. Survey and moisture readings first, then dust-controlled sanding back to clean timber, then repairs with matched boards, then fine sanding to an even surface.
Seal follows in the correct number of coats with proper curing between them, markings laid between coats so they sit protected within the finish, and finally a documented handover setting out exactly when the floor takes traffic, equipment and full play.
Distance is a planning problem rather than a quality one. Projects further afield are organised as complete visits: everything surveyed, agreed and priced before we travel, all materials and machinery brought in at the outset.
Nothing is left part-finished awaiting a return trip, and there are no additional mobilisation costs appearing mid-programme. It is how we have worked the length of the country for nearly four decades.
Facilities are frequently surprised by how complete the transformation is. A floor that looked finished, grey through the traffic lanes with markings closer to guesswork than instruction, comes back reading as a new installation.
That is not a trick of photography; it is what removing years of degraded finish and rebuilding it properly actually produces. We are happy to share full before and after documentation from comparable projects so you can judge before committing.
The sports hall floor at Treguib had given years of service and looked it. Our team took it back to clean timber, repaired the wear, then resealed and re-marked the full hall.
The result is a floor that plays and looks like new for a fraction of replacement cost, delivered a long way from our base and still on the date we promised.
~ 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
Sanding makes dust. The question is whether it stays in the room or ends up through the building, and that is a matter of equipment and preparation rather than luck.
Our machines run on sealed vacuum extraction rather than bag systems, which captures the great majority of it at source. We screen the working area, and we agree with your site team which doors, vents and air handling routes need isolating before we start. In buildings with shared ventilation, particularly leisure centres with a pool hall, that conversation matters.
Edges and corners are the point at which dust escapes on a badly run job, because hand machines are harder to extract from. We use extracted edge equipment for the same reason we use it everywhere else.
The room we are working in will be dusty. The rest of the building should not be, and if it is then something has been done wrong. We would rather set the expectation clearly than have you discover it.
Gym floors fail differently from every other floor in a building, because the damage is point loading rather than even wear.
Dropped dumbbells, plate loaded machines dragged rather than lifted, benches shuffled across boards and racks bolted down and later moved all leave dents and gouges. Sanding removes a surface but a deep dent stays a dent, and part of our survey is telling you which marks will come out and which will not.
Chalk and sweat are the other half. Both soak into timber wherever the seal has worn through, and chalk in open grain can leave a permanent grey cast in the lifting area.
Rubber matting laid straight onto a sealed floor and left down for years traps moisture and can bond to the lacquer, so lifting it takes the finish with it. It is one of the main reasons gym floors arrive in worse condition than the sports hall next door.
The answer is usually a harder finish, an extra coat in the free weight zone, and a proper lifting platform where the weights actually land.
Where one organisation is responsible for several sports floors, the sensible approach is a programme rather than a series of separate decisions.
We start with a condition survey of every floor: construction, remaining wear layer, state of the finish and structure, markings, moisture, all photographed and recorded. That produces one document showing what the estate holds and what condition it is in, which very few organisations have.
From there the work is prioritised. Some floors need attention this year, some can wait three, some need nothing beyond maintenance. The programme then phases across budget years, taking each hall out of use at the quietest point in its own calendar rather than trying to do everything in one summer.
The advantages compound. Costs fall because mobilisation is spread and the sequence is efficient. Specification is consistent across every site. Documentation is standardised. And nobody is ever in the position of having six floors fail at once.
We work this way with academy trusts, local authorities, leisure operators and universities.
Almost every hall we work in has a stage, and it is usually in worse condition than the hall floor because of what gets dragged across it.
Stages are often a different construction and a different timber from the room they sit in, sometimes with a hollow void beneath for resonance. That changes how they are sanded and what they can take, and it is worth knowing before a machine goes on.
The finish is a different decision too. A matt or dead matt seal kills the reflections that stage lighting otherwise produces, and it hides the scuffing that scenery and staging leave. Some venues want a stage that can be painted for productions, which changes the specification again and needs discussing at the outset rather than afterwards.
We generally recommend doing the stage at the same time as the hall. It costs considerably less than two separate visits, it gives a consistent appearance, and the stage is usually the part that most needs it.
Cornwall work reaches us mainly from leisure centres, secondary school sports halls and a large number of community and church buildings, and the practical consideration is how the work is programmed.
Because the county is a long way from most suppliers, we plan these jobs as continuous blocks and bring everything with us rather than relying on collecting materials locally. That makes the programme tighter rather than looser, since it all has to be worked out before we set off.
Leisure centre halls are usually the busiest floors in the county and the ones most in need of a sensible maintenance cycle. We completed work at Liskeard Leisure Centre, and that project is a fair example: a heavily used hall, an operator who could not afford a long closure, and a programme built around the centre timetable rather than ours.
School halls follow, with the usual fixed term dates. Village and church halls are the third group and often the most transformed, because those old timber floors usually have plenty of depth left under the polish.
Where several facilities are considering work, sequencing them into one trip is worth doing.
The project we point to most often for Cornwall enquiries is Liskeard Leisure Centre, because it answers the two questions operators here always ask.
The first is whether a contractor travelling to the far south west can actually hold a programme. We plan work in this region as continuous blocks with machinery, abrasives, coatings and spares all brought with us, because nothing can be collected the same afternoon. In practice that makes these projects more tightly planned than a job an hour from base, and the dates more reliable rather than less.
The second is whether the centre can keep trading. At Liskeard the programme was built around the centre timetable rather than ours, with the work sequenced so the noisiest operations fell when the building was quietest, and dust extraction and screening arranged so the rest of the facility stayed usable.
For school halls in the county the closer comparison is De Wint School, where the constraint was the term date rather than booking income.
A good proportion of the relining we do is because a hall is being asked to do something different from what it was marked for.
Pickleball is the obvious recent example. It shares its footprint with badminton, so adding it is usually a matter of the kitchen lines and a centre service line rather than a whole new court. Walking netball, short mat bowls and indoor cricket all turn up for the same reason: a facility has picked up a new user group and the floor has not caught up.
The temptation is to add the new sport on top of everything already there. In a hall that already carries five sets of markings that makes the floor genuinely hard to use, so we would rather look at the whole scheme and take something off at the same time.
We will ask what is actually played now, in what proportion, and set out a hierarchy where the sport used most gets the clearest colour and the most visual weight. Fewer lines, correctly dimensioned, beats more lines every time.
There is no standard rate, because no two floors arrive in the same condition. What we can promise is that we will identify the cheapest option that genuinely solves the problem and quote it alongside the fuller alternatives, with firm figures rather than ranges.
Yes, throughout. Distance is a logistics question rather than a quality one, and we resolve it by planning the whole programme in advance rather than working in stages.
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.
Full sports halls, multi-court leisure facilities, specialist court installations and whole-estate programmes. If you are unsure whether your project fits, call and we will tell you straight away rather than wasting your time.
Yes. Overnight shifts, weekend blocks, phased sections and holiday programmes are all standard. We agree which sessions are affected before anything is booked out.
Usually because the expansion gaps at the perimeter have closed or been blocked, or because moisture is coming up through the slab. Both need diagnosing before refinishing, or the cause simply repeats.
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.
Yes, and we recommend doing both together. Stages are usually in worse condition than the hall floor, and one visit costs considerably less than two while giving a consistent finish.
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.
A light abrasion of the existing finish followed by a fresh top coat. It restores grip and appearance at a fraction of the cost of a full sand, and it works whenever the seal is worn but still intact.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Cornwall 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.