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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Hertfordshire and across the UK. A large proportion of the halls we survey here were built between the 1950s and 1980s, which brings a specific set of floor types with it.
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
Getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake available. Granwood and composite block floors look superficially like timber but hold almost no surface material, and sanding one the way you would sand boards destroys it permanently.
Granwood appears as small rectangular blocks in a brick-like pattern and feels noticeably harder underfoot. If you are not certain what you have, send a photograph and we will identify it free of charge before anybody quotes for work.
A sound Granwood floor is well worth keeping. The correct route is careful preparation followed by a specialist modified epoxy coating system, which restores an even, consistent surface with the colour back in it and provides a durable finish for heavy use.
It costs a fraction of replacement, keeps a serviceable floor out of a skip, and produces a result most people assume must be a new installation. Fresh markings are applied as part of the same programme.
Buildings from that era were frequently constructed at speed, and their slabs often predate modern damp-proofing expectations. Vapour rising from below is the commonest reason a floor laid over one fails early.
We take moisture readings in and beneath the floor before specifying anything, and where readings demand a barrier we install one and explain why. Where they do not, we leave it out rather than adding cost you do not need.
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
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.
For a leisure operator, floor work is a revenue problem before it is a maintenance problem, and we programme accordingly.
Closing a sports hall stops booking income immediately, and members notice. So most of this work happens overnight or across quiet weeks, sequenced so the noisiest operations fall when the rest of the building is emptiest. Sealing at the end of a shift means the floor is walkable by opening.
Dust control matters more in a leisure centre than almost anywhere, because air handling is usually shared between spaces and a pool hall carries dust remarkably well. Sealed extraction and proper screening keep the rest of the building usable.
Operators running facilities on contract often have obligations about facility standards, which makes documented condition and slip resistance testing genuinely useful rather than administrative. We provide the certificates as a matter of course.
Where an operator holds several sites, a phased programme across the estate is almost always better value than site by site reaction.
Most halls are asked to accommodate five or six sports on one floor, and the difference between a hall that works and one that confuses everybody is hierarchy rather than cleverness.
We start by asking what is actually played, and in what proportion. The sport used most gets the dominant colour and the clearest line. Secondary sports step back. Anything genuinely redundant comes off, which is almost always the single biggest improvement available.
The conflicts are predictable. Netball goal circles land on the basketball key. Badminton tramlines cross both. Five a side markings run through everything. We resolve them by colour weight and by removing clutter, not by adding more variation into an already crowded floor.
Colour choice is made under your own hall lighting rather than on a paint chart, because LED refits have changed how colours read in a great many halls. Two shades that look distinct on paper can merge completely on the floor.
University sports facilities have a particular problem: they are busy year round, so the long summer shutdown that schools rely on does not exist.
Term brings curriculum use, club training and league fixtures. The summer brings conferences, summer schools and external hire, which is often more lucrative than term time use. The window for work is therefore narrow, defined and non negotiable.
The way we handle it is by planning to the window rather than hoping to fit inside it. We survey early, order materials in advance, staff the job properly rather than spreading a team across sites, and build the cure times into the programme rather than treating them as slack.
Campus estates usually hold several floors of different ages: a main sports hall, studios, squash courts and a fitness suite, often built decades apart. A condition survey across all of them, with a phased programme, is generally far more useful than dealing with each as it becomes urgent.
Hertfordshire gives us a heavy weighting towards school sport, with academy trust estates, independent schools and grammar schools all well represented.
Trust work is the pattern we see most. Where one organisation holds ten or twenty sports halls of differing ages, a condition survey across the estate followed by a phased programme is far more useful than dealing with each hall as it becomes urgent. It spreads the spend across budget years and stops several floors reaching crisis in the same summer.
Independent and grammar school halls tend to be better maintained and come to us for preventative work, which is exactly right. A screen and recoat every two to three years keeps a floor off the full refinish cycle for far longer.
Leisure centres and community facilities follow, where booking income means overnight and weekend working.
We completed work at De Wint School in the wider region, and the constraints were typical: a hall in constant use, a finish long overdue, and a fixed date to be back for term. Summer slots book up early, so it is worth raising these in January rather than June.
Almost every Hertfordshire enquiry is a school or trust, so the comparison that matters is De Wint School.
That hall had gone considerably longer than it should have between refinishes. The seal had worn through in the traffic lanes, dirt had worked into open timber, and the markings had faded to the point where several sports were awkward to officiate. We sanded back to bare timber, cut out and replaced the damaged boards, resealed with a two pack polyurethane, and set the markings out fresh from measured governing body dimensions instead of tracing what was there.
Two redundant sets came off while the floor was open, which cost nothing and made the hall noticeably clearer.
The constraint throughout was the term date, and it did not move. That is the case on every school project, and it is why we survey early, order materials ahead and staff the job to finish inside the window rather than treating the end date as an aspiration.
The most common mistake in court relining is tracing what is already on the floor. It repeats old errors and it keeps sports on the hall that nobody plays any more.
We set out from current governing body dimensions using laser and tape, not from the existing paint. Courts that have been remarked by copying the previous set drift over the years, and a surprising number of halls turn out to have netball thirds that are not equal or three point arcs that are not true. If your courts have always felt slightly wrong, that is usually why.
Every dimension is checked before a drop of paint goes down, and the two ends of a court are compared so the layout is symmetrical rather than merely plausible.
On timber the lines go on between coats of seal, which puts the paint under the final lacquer where trainers, trolleys and scrubber driers cannot reach it. That single detail is the difference between line marking that lasts the life of the finish and line marking that starts lifting within a season.
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.
Usually, provided the source is fixed first. Damaged boards are cut out and replaced with matching timber before the floor is sanded and sealed as one surface, so the repair disappears into the finish.
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.
A well maintained hall wants a light screen and recoat every two to three years and a full sand roughly every ten. Sticking to that keeps the boards alive far longer, because every full sand removes timber permanently.
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, and it is routine. Split, damaged and water damaged boards are cut out and replaced with matching timber laid to the same grain direction, so the repair disappears once the floor is sanded.
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.
Sealed vacuum extraction on all machines including edge equipment, screening of the working area, and agreement with your site team on isolating doors and air handling routes.
It can if it is run too hot or brought up too quickly, which dries the boards and opens gaps. The system needs proper commissioning and controlled surface temperatures, and the timber needs to be specified as suitable.
Book a free survey of your floor in Hertfordshire 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.