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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Dorset and across the UK. Our work spans schools, leisure facilities and community buildings, with a good deal of specialist restoration among it.
We have been specialising in indoor sports and commercial timber floors since 1987. The business is family-run, nothing is subcontracted, and the crew who survey a building are the crew who work on it. Domestic and residential projects fall outside what we do and are looked after by our sister company, Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Routine mopping removes surface dirt but leaves embedded residue behind, and that residue is what dulls a floor and reduces grip. Machine deep cleaning uses appropriate solutions and mechanical agitation to lift it out of the surface texture.
The result is frequently mistaken for a refurbishment. Starting from four pounds fifty per square metre, it is the cheapest intervention available and regularly removes the need for anything more drastic for another year or two.
Most floor problems we attend were caused with good intentions. Stronger product seems logical when a floor looks dull, but over-concentration and incorrect pH leave precisely the film that caused the dullness in the first place.
We recommend products matched to your specific finish and to local water hardness, demonstrate correct dilution and method to your own team, and leave written guidance. It is unglamorous advice that saves more money than anything else we offer.
There is no universal schedule. A hall used six hours a day needs different attention from one used sixteen, and a building with a gravel car park needs different attention from one with a paved approach.
We set intervals against your actual usage and environment: how often to deep clean, when a recoat becomes worthwhile, and roughly when a full sand should be budgeted. Getting that interval right is what keeps a floor out of the expensive cycle.
Harris Academy wanted a sports floor to match its ambitions, so we fitted a complete Junckers solid-beech sports system, the same Danish flooring specified in elite competition venues, finished with full multi-sport line markings.
An installation like that is a long-term statement: properly maintained, it will outlast every pupil currently on the roll. The project ran to programme from bare sub-floor to handover.
~ 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
A new finish is only as good as the regime that follows it, and the fastest way to waste the money is to put the wrong mop on it in week one.
The guidance we hand over is deliberately short. Dust mop daily with a treated cloth to lift grit before it acts as an abrasive underfoot. Damp mop with a neutral cleaner made for sealed sports timber. Deal with spills quickly. Keep a decent mat run at the entrances, because most of the grit that wears a floor walks in on trainers.
What to avoid is equally short. No polish, no wax, nothing that promises shine. These build up, reduce slip resistance and eventually have to be stripped chemically at real cost. They are the most common cause of the slippery floors we are called out to.
Scrubber driers are fine if they are set up correctly and the water is picked up rather than left standing. We are happy to look at your machine settings while we are on site.
Every job is carried out by our own directly employed team using our own equipment. Nothing is passed to a chain of subcontractors, and that has practical consequences rather than being a slogan.
It means the people who survey your floor are connected to the people who work on it, so what was agreed is what happens. It means we control the programme rather than waiting on somebody else availability, which is why we can commit to a finish date and hold it. And it means the standard is consistent, because it is the same team on the last day as the first.
It also matters for the specialist work. Granwood restoration, parquet, sprung floor repairs and pendulum testing are not things you can subcontract to a general flooring firm and expect a good result. They are learned over years.
Courtship Flooring has been doing this since 1987, and a good deal of the team has been with the company for a very long time. That continuity is the reason we can look at a floor and know what is under it.
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.
The question we are asked most often, and the answer comes down to three measurements rather than an opinion.
The first is the remaining wear layer. Every full sand takes timber off, and a floor that has been through many cycles may be close to its fixings. Once a sander reaches the tongue the board is finished, and nothing changes that.
The second is the structure. Isolated failed pads and battens are routine repairs. A system that has failed widely, or one that never suited the hall, is a different proposition.
The third is moisture. A slab with an active problem will destroy any floor laid on it, new or refurbished, until the cause is dealt with.
If the wear layer is adequate, the structure is largely sound and the slab is dry, refurbishment is almost always better value and will give many more years. Where those things are not true we say so plainly, because a refurbishment on a failing floor is money spent twice.
Dorset is close enough to our base for us to be on site quickly, and the work divides between school sport, leisure facilities and a large number of community halls.
School and academy sports halls are the biggest group. The recurring issue is halls that have gone a decade or more without a proper refinish, where the seal has worn through in the traffic lanes and dirt is now sitting in open timber. Left much longer, the staining goes deep enough that sanding will not fully remove it, which is why we encourage schools to plan on a cycle rather than waiting for a complaint.
Leisure centres and community sports facilities follow, where the driver is keeping the building trading and most work happens overnight or across a quiet week.
The third group is village halls, church halls and club buildings. These are usually committee decisions funded by hire income and fundraising, so we quote by element and phase the work where it helps.
Because we are local to this part of the country we can survey quickly and often fit smaller jobs around larger programmes, which helps on both cost and timing.
Because Dorset is close to our base, the projects we point to for comparison are ones many local facilities managers already know of.
St Katherine Hall is the closest for community buildings. An old timber floor carrying badminton one evening and a community event the next, under decades of accumulated polish, with chair and table scoring across the whole area. The polish came off chemically before sanding, the boards underneath had plenty of depth, and the hall is now good for another few decades.
Medina Leisure Centre is the comparison for operator run facilities, where the constraint was booking income rather than budget, solved by programming around the centre timetable rather than asking the centre to work around us.
For schools, De Wint School is the closest: a hall long overdue a refinish, with a fixed term date and no flexibility at the end of it.
Being local, we can usually get to a survey within days rather than weeks.
Almost every hall we survey carries markings for at least one sport nobody has played in years, and a good many carry three or four.
Short tennis lines from a scheme that ended a decade ago. Five a side markings for a layout the school no longer uses. A junior court for a year group that is no longer taught. Every one of them adds visual noise and makes the sports you do play harder to read, particularly for a referee.
So relining starts with a conversation about what is actually used rather than what is currently painted. Taking two redundant sets off does more for clarity than any amount of clever colour selection, and it makes the job cheaper rather than dearer because there is less to put back.
On timber the reliable way to remove old line marking is to sand the floor, which takes it off completely. Where a full sand is not warranted we can often over seal instead. Either way, halls look considerably larger and considerably smarter once the clutter has gone.
It depends on what the floor actually needs. A deep clean is the least expensive intervention, a recoat sits in the middle, a full sand and seal above that, and replacement is the rare last resort. We survey free of charge and price every realistic option so you can choose on evidence.
All of it, plus the surrounding region. Everything is surveyed, agreed and priced before we set off, so there are no additional travel charges appearing partway through a project.
Regularly. Original timber is restored rather than replaced wherever it is sound, interventions stay sympathetic, and we can advise on what conservation officers typically accept.
We coordinate floor sockets, net post positions and equipment interfaces as part of installation and marking, so the finished floor works with the equipment you actually use.
Almost always, and it is usually the right answer. Sanding, repairing and resealing costs a fraction of a new floor with far less disruption. We only recommend replacement where moisture or sub-floor failure genuinely rules restoration out.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes. We survey the slab for level and moisture first, install mitigation where readings require it, and specify the system to the actual timetable of the hall rather than to a standard answer.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Dorset 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.