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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in County Durham and across the UK. Our work spans university and college facilities working to tight vacation windows and community buildings working to tight budgets.
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
Academic vacations are short and immovable, which makes sequencing everything. A full refurbishment has to be planned so that sanding, repairs, sealing and curing all complete with contingency left, because a floor that is not ready when term starts is a serious problem rather than an inconvenience.
We build that contingency in deliberately and confirm the handover date in writing. Larger facilities are phased so part of the space remains available throughout.
Where funds are genuinely tight, the question is not what the floor ideally needs but what will deliver the most benefit for the money available. That is usually a deep clean and reline rather than a refurbishment, or a recoat rather than a full sand.
We will always price the cheapest option that genuinely works and explain what it does and does not achieve, rather than presenting a single expensive recommendation and leaving you to negotiate downwards.
An old floor with limited depth left can still give years of service if it is managed rather than machined. Recoating instead of sanding, addressing entrance wear, correcting the cleaning routine and repairing damage locally all extend life without spending timber.
We will tell you honestly how many refinishing cycles a floor has left, so replacement can be planned and budgeted rather than arriving as an emergency.
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.
Basketball wears a floor in two rectangles. The keys take every rebound, post move and landing, and the finish there can be through to bare timber while the rest of the court still looks respectable.
We mark to current FIBA dimensions: a 28 by 15 metre court with the three point line at 6.75 metres from the centre of the basket, reducing to 6.6 metres in the corners. The restricted area is a rectangle with a no charge semi circle, not the trapezoid still found in many older halls, which is usually the giveaway that a court has not been set out properly in decades.
Sole marking is the other characteristic problem. Basketball shoes grip, and that grip transfers rubber across the whole surface. On a well sealed floor it cleans off. Where the seal has gone thin it works into open grain and stops coming out.
A coloured key or a crest at centre court is applied between coats so it wears with the floor rather than scuffing off, and it costs least while the floor is already open.
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.
The real saving in looking after a sports floor is not in the refurbishment, it is in avoiding one.
A floor that receives a light screen and recoat every two to three years may never need another full sand. A floor left until the seal has worn through to bare timber will need a full refinish, and will have lost some of its remaining wear layer permanently in the meantime. Over the life of a building that difference is substantial.
A planned programme means scheduled visits rather than reactive calls: deep cleaning, screen and recoat when it is due, minor board repairs, remarking as lines wear, and an annual written condition inspection.
The inspection is the part clients tell us they value most, because it turns an unpredictable risk into a short report with a clear recommendation and a rough cost. That is something that can be put in front of a board or a governing body, and it is a great deal better than finding out in July that a hall will not open in September.
County Durham and Teesside bring us a mix of academy trust estates, council leisure facilities and university sport, with a good proportion of older building stock.
Academy trust work is the pattern we see most. A trust with a dozen schools holds a dozen sports halls of widely differing ages and conditions, usually with no single record of what state any of them are in. A condition survey across the estate is generally the most useful first step, because it converts an unpredictable cost into a phased programme rather than a series of emergencies.
The older halls in the region are frequently Granwood or timber laid in the middle of the last century. Both are often written off unnecessarily. A Granwood floor with sound blocks and an intact bed is almost always worth restoring, and it costs a fraction of replacement, particularly once the cost of lifting a bitumen bed is taken into account.
Leisure centre and community sport work makes up the rest, and there the priority is keeping the building trading, which usually means overnight or weekend working rather than a long closure.
The enquiries that reach us from County Durham and Teesside have a fairly consistent shape, shaped by the age of the building stock.
The most common is a mid century school hall whose floor has never been properly refinished, only recoated. Layer upon layer of sealer eventually goes cloudy, peels at the edges and lifts in sheets, and the only real answer is to take it back to bare timber and rebuild the finish properly.
The second is Granwood, which appears here more than in many regions. It is regularly condemned when it should not be. The blocks are usually sound, the bed is usually intact, and restoration costs a fraction of a replacement that would also mean lifting a bitumen bed that may need specialist handling.
The third is trusts finding that several halls need attention at once, which is what a phased estate programme exists to prevent. That starts with surveying all of them and producing a costed priority order.
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.
Usually cleaning residue rather than a worn seal. Over-strength product or the wrong pH leaves a film that reduces grip. A deep clean normally restores it, and a slip test confirms it objectively.
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. We survey, take moisture readings, measure the remaining board depth and look at the structure, then quote a fixed sum broken down by element. There is no charge and no obligation.
Yes, provided it is set up correctly and picks the water up rather than leaving it standing. We are happy to check your machine settings while we are on site.
Heating dries the air, the boards give up moisture and shrink. It is normal seasonal movement rather than a fault, and it closes again in summer. Keeping the building humidity more stable reduces it.
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 it is a genuine specialism. Granwood is a composite block in a bitumen bed, not timber, and it needs appropriate preparation and a modified epoxy coating system rather than standard sanding and lacquering.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in County Durham 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.