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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Essex and across the UK. A large share of our work is for academy trusts, where several school halls are surveyed, specified and delivered as one summer programme.
Established in 1987 and still family-run, we install, refurbish, sand, seal, mark and maintain indoor sports floors for schools, academies, colleges, universities, leisure trusts, local authorities and clubs. Every stage is carried out by our own team. We do not undertake domestic work; that is handled 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
The summer break is roughly six usable weeks, and a trust with five halls cannot afford a contractor who can only manage one at a time. Sequencing matters: which halls need the longest programmes, which can absorb a delay, and where machinery and crews move next.
We plan the whole sequence before the first site starts, with individual start and reopening dates for every hall. Because we do not subcontract, the same crew and the same standard arrive at the last school as at the first.
Three things move the price of a floor project more than anything else: the condition of the sub-floor, how much preparation the existing surface needs, and how tightly the programme is compressed. The first two are discovered at survey; the third is within your control.
Booking early and allowing a sensible window is consistently cheaper than an urgent job squeezed into a fortnight. We will tell you where a slightly longer programme saves real money.
More school hall floors are damaged during exams than during PE. Rows of desks and chairs dragged into position leave indentation and scuffing that sport never would, and it happens over a fortnight every year.
Protective covering laid over the playing surface prevents almost all of it and lifts quickly afterwards. It costs a fraction of the repairs it avoids, and we will advise on the right type for your floor and how to handle it.
Years of heavy use had left the sports hall floor at Aston University dull, patchy and worn along every busy lane. Our team sanded it back to bare timber, made good the damage, then rebuilt the finish with a durable seal and a full set of new markings, working around a demanding academic timetable.
The before and after photographs show what a properly executed refurbishment delivers: a floor that looks and plays like new, for a fraction of replacement cost and without weeks of disruption.
~ 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
Grip is the one property of a sports floor that can be put on paper. We test with a pendulum to BS 7976-2, taking readings in a grid across the hall and in more than one direction, because the centre of a court wears differently from the edges and a single reading proves nothing.
The result is a written report with the values, the positions and a clear statement against the threshold accepted for sports use. Trusts across Essex use it two ways: as evidence that a hall reported as slippery has a real problem, and as a certificate on completion of a refinish that the new surface performs.
Where a floor fails, we say why. Polish build up, the wrong cleaner or a seal worn smooth in the traffic lanes account for nearly every low reading we record, and each has a straightforward fix.
Some of the older school and church halls in Essex have Granwood floors, and they are regularly misidentified. Granwood is a block of wood flour and cement pressed under heat, laid in a bitumen bed in a brick pattern. It has no grain and very little material above the bed, so sanding it as if it were timber ruins it.
Restored correctly, a Granwood floor has decades left. We prepare the surface with the right abrasives, rebed loose blocks, replace broken ones and coat the floor with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates. The court lines go into the coating.
The bitumen bed in floors of that age may contain asbestos, so we test before lifting anything. Replacement is rarely necessary and always expensive, because it means taking up the bed as well as the blocks, and a quotation for a new floor does not always make that clear.
The final coat of seal is not the end of the programme. A two pack polyurethane takes light foot traffic after twenty four hours and full use with equipment after seventy two hours or more. It goes on hardening for about a week, and a floor loaded early carries the marks permanently until it is recoated.
So we build the cure into the dates we give you rather than treating it as slack. A trust in Essex programming five halls into one summer needs to know the exact day each one can take desks or goal posts again, and we confirm it against the manufacturer’s data for the product used.
If the hall is needed sooner than the programme allows, we say so at the outset and look at splitting the floor or working nights, not at shortening the cure.
Squash court floors are the one place a gloss lacquer is the wrong answer. The court is either left as bare sanded timber or finished with a matt, high grip system, because constant stopping and turning on the T polishes the middle of the floor smooth while the corners still look new. A slippery court is an injury waiting to happen.
We sand, repair and refinish squash courts, replacing split boards and tightening fixings that loosen under years of hard play. Dust control is tighter than in a hall because the plaster walls are part of the playing surface and cannot be sanded clean.
Where a club or school in Essex has several courts, we phase them so play continues on the others, and we combine the courts with the main hall in a single visit so the mobilisation cost is paid once.
Essex brings us one of the largest concentrations of academy trust work in the country, alongside leisure operator facilities and a substantial number of community buildings.
Trust estates are the pattern we see most. A trust holding fifteen or twenty schools has that many sports halls, built decades apart, in wildly differing condition, and usually with no single record of any of it. The most useful thing we can do in that situation is survey the whole estate and produce a costed priority order, which turns an unpredictable liability into a programme that can be phased across budget years.
Individual school halls arrive for the usual reasons. A finish worn through in the traffic lanes, markings that have been copied rather than set out for several remarks running, or a hall that has become slippery.
Leisure operator work follows, where the priority is keeping the building trading and most of it happens overnight.
We completed work at De Wint School in the wider region, and the pattern was typical: survey properly, plan to the holiday window, hand back on the agreed date.
The pattern of enquiries from Essex is dominated by academy trust estates, and that shapes what we are asked to do.
The most common request is not for a single hall but for a view of several. A trust that has had two floors fail unexpectedly wants to know which of the others are next, and the answer is a condition survey across the estate producing a costed priority order. That converts an unpredictable liability into a programme.
Where individual halls do come to us, the recurring issue is a finish that has worn through in the traffic lanes on a floor that is otherwise structurally sound. Those restore well, and a survey usually finds more life left than the school has been told.
The third is markings. Halls carrying five or six sports in colours that merge under LED lighting are common, and rationalising them down to what is actually played is the cheapest improvement available to any facility.
Cleaning damages more floors than sport does, and the damage is easy to avoid. Use a neutral pH cleaner at the maker’s dilution. Never apply polish, wax or anything sold as a shine restorer, because it builds a film that turns the floor slippery and has to be stripped chemically before any recoat.
Dust mop daily to lift grit, damp mop weekly with a well wrung mop, and if a scrubber drier is used, keep the water low and the pads soft. Never leave water standing on timber.
On handover we run through the routine with your cleaning team, leave written guidance and recommend products that suit the floor and the local water. Contract cleaners rotate often across Essex school estates, so a laminated sheet in the store cupboard has saved more than one floor from an enthusiastic new starter with the wrong bottle.
Yes. We work from Southend and the coast through Chelmsford and Colchester to the London fringe, and nationally beyond that. Our own team travels with its own machinery, and any travel costs appear as a separate line in the quotation.
Yes. Most halls carry four or five sports, ranked by colour and line style so the main sport reads clearly. We set every court out from governing body dimensions and ask what is actually played, so unused sets can come off and the hall becomes easier to read.
Usually four or five over its life, governed by the depth of timber above the tongue, which we measure at survey. A floor kept on a screen and recoat cycle needs a full sand only around every ten years, so the boards can last well over fifty.
Yes. We install area elastic and point elastic timber systems to BS EN 14904, as well as sports vinyl, linoleum and polyurethane. We advise on which suits the room and the users, and we will say plainly if your existing floor is worth restoring instead.
No. Courtship Flooring is a commercial contractor working for schools, trusts, universities, leisure operators, clubs and councils only. Domestic floor sanding and restoration is handled by our sister company, Ryan’s Restorations, and we are happy to pass an enquiry on.
None of it. Survey, sanding, repairs, sealing, marking and testing are all carried out by our own directly employed team using our own equipment. That is what lets us hold a finish date across several sites and keep the standard the same at each.
A two pack polyurethane in a satin sheen. It is hard wearing, gives the friction sports need without glare under LED lighting, and takes court lines between coats so they wear with the finish. We select the specific system for the workload of the room.
A resilient pad, batten or cradle beneath the boards has failed, so that patch no longer flexes with the rest of the floor. The fix is to lift the boards locally and replace the component. Refinishing on its own will not change how it feels.
We work right across the south east, including London, Kent, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. See all areas we cover.
Book a free survey of your sports hall floor in Essex, for one hall or a whole trust estate. We assess it, tell you what it needs and fix the price and dates in writing. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.