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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Exeter and across the UK. We cover the South West intensively, and much of the work involves diagnosing moisture problems properly before any surface work is quoted.
Nearly four decades of specialist work sits behind every project: installation, refurbishment, sanding and sealing, court marking, slip testing and planned maintenance, all delivered in-house. Our clients are institutions and operators rather than households, and private homes are handled by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
More sports floors are ruined by water than by wear. Older slabs and converted buildings often lack an effective damp barrier, and vapour rising from below will cup, lift and eventually rot a timber floor laid over it, regardless of how good the timber is.
Every survey we carry out includes moisture readings in and beneath the floor. Where they demand a barrier we specify one and explain why; where they do not, we leave it out rather than adding cost. Either way the readings are provided in writing.
Timber is not always the right answer. Where a hall doubles as a dining room, exam venue or events space, furniture does far more damage than sport, and a synthetic surface will frequently cost less to own across its life.
We install vinyl, polyurethane and lino systems alongside timber, weld vinyl seams properly so water cannot reach the sub-floor, and will set out the lifecycle cost of each option honestly before you choose.
Synthetic floors cannot be sanded, but they are far from disposable. Deep cleaning lifts embedded residue, damaged areas can be cut out and patched, failed seams can be re-welded, and some systems can be resealed to restore appearance and grip.
Poor welding is the single most common defect we are called to repair on vinyl sports floors, and it is entirely avoidable with the right tools and temperature. We repair floors other contractors laid as readily as our own.
The main sports hall at Liskeard Leisure Centre had taken years of public sessions, club blocks and league nights. We delivered a complete programme of sanding, re-lining and resealing, returning the hall to service looking like a new installation.
It is a fair illustration of how we handle leisure work: one tight programme, agreed dates, and a centre back in action on schedule.
~ 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
Commercial and public buildings need documentation, and providing it in advance rather than on request is part of what distinguishes a specialist contractor.
Before the work you receive method statements and risk assessments specific to the job rather than a generic template, COSHH data sheets for every product we will bring on site, and copies of our public liability and employers liability insurance.
For school sites we provide DBS details for the staff attending, and we work to whatever additional safeguarding arrangements the school or trust requires. Our teams are used to signing in, wearing identification and staying within agreed areas.
On main contractor sites we work to site rules, attend inductions and provide progress reporting in whatever format the contract requires.
At handover you get the product data sheets, the cure times in writing, aftercare guidance and, where requested, the pendulum slip resistance certificate. It goes into the facilities file as a complete record rather than a folder of assurances.
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.
Timber floors move with the humidity of the building around them, and a great many problems blamed on workmanship are actually a building management issue.
Gaps that open every winter and close every summer are the classic pattern. Heating dries the air, the boards give up moisture and shrink, and the gaps appear. Come summer the moisture returns and they close. That is normal behaviour rather than a fault, though it can be reduced by keeping the building within a more stable range.
The problems start at the extremes. Very dry heated air over a long winter can shrink boards enough to split them or pull them off their fixings. Very damp conditions, particularly in an unheated hall that is suddenly used intensively, cause expansion, and where the perimeter gaps have been closed by later flooring or skirting the floor has nowhere to go and lifts in the middle.
Running ventilation after use, rather than only during it, makes a measurable difference in halls that get hot and humid.
Not every sports floor is timber, and the synthetic surfaces have a genuine place rather than being a cheap alternative.
Point elastic vinyl systems deflect where they are loaded rather than across an area, which makes them forgiving underfoot and well suited to halls with a very mixed timetable. They need no refinishing, they clean easily, and they come in a range of colours that lets a hall be designed rather than simply floored. They have a finite life and are replaced rather than restored when it ends.
Linoleum is the older relation, still found in a great many school halls, and it can often be deep cleaned and resealed rather than replaced.
Polyurethane and modified epoxy systems are seamless, poured or applied as coatings, and are particularly useful over Granwood and cementitious substrates. They can be fully recoated in a new colour with fresh markings, which turns a tired hall into a refurbished one without touching what is underneath.
We work across all of them, and we will tell you honestly when your existing surface is worth keeping.
Exeter work comes to us from university sport, the city and district leisure facilities, and secondary school halls, with a steady flow of community buildings alongside.
University facilities are the most demanding to programme. They are busy year round, with conference and summer school use filling the period a school would be closed, so the working window is narrow and does not move. Those projects are planned well ahead and staffed to complete inside it.
Leisure centre halls are usually the busiest floors and the ones that most benefit from a proper maintenance cycle. Catching a floor with a screen and recoat before the seal wears through is what keeps it off the replacement list, and it costs a fraction of a full refinish.
School and academy halls follow the fixed term dates, and summer slots book up a long way ahead.
We are regularly in the south west and completed work at Liskeard Leisure Centre nearby, so travel to this part of the country is routine rather than exceptional. Where several facilities are considering work, sequencing them together is worth doing.
Two projects answer most of the questions we get from Exeter.
Liskeard Leisure Centre is the closest for operator run facilities in the south west. The centre could not afford lost bookings, so the programme was built around its timetable, with the noisiest work sequenced for the quietest hours and dust extraction arranged so the rest of the building stayed usable. It also demonstrates that we plan work in this region as continuous blocks with everything brought with us, which makes the dates more reliable rather than less.
Aston University is the better comparison for campus sport, where the constraint is a year round timetable with no genuine summer shutdown. That was solved by surveying early, ordering materials ahead and staffing the job to finish inside the window rather than hoping it would stretch.
In both cases the technical work was routine. The value was in the programming.
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.
Three things drive the figure: hall size, the amount of preparation the existing surface needs, and whether the sub-floor requires attention. All three are established at survey, after which the quotation is fixed. We do not price from a distance and then revise once work starts.
We cover the entire area and beyond. Our projects have taken us across the UK and internationally, and the planning method is the same wherever the building happens to be.
Protective covering laid over the playing surface takes the punishment from desk and chair legs and lifts quickly afterwards. It costs far less than repairing the damage.
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.
Satin or matt in almost every case. Gloss looks impressive at handover and shows every scuff within weeks, as well as producing noticeable glare under modern lighting.
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.
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 set out from measured dimensions rather than copying existing lines. Courts remarked by tracing the previous set drift over the years, and many halls turn out to be dimensionally out.
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.
Usually a two pack polyurethane in a satin sheen. It holds slip resistance and appearance under heavy use, and satin hides scuffing and avoids glare under the LED lighting most halls now have.
Book a free survey of your floor in Exeter 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.