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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in the Highlands and across the UK. Work here is planned as a concentrated residency, with everything surveyed, agreed and priced before we travel.
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
Remote facilities are routinely told a job is not worth a contractor’s time. We disagree, and our record across Cornwall, Cumbria and the north of Scotland demonstrates it.
The method is simply thorough preparation: full material schedules, contingency stock, power and access confirmed in advance, and the entire programme completed in one visit. Nothing is left waiting on a second trip.
Where a community has one substantial building, its floor takes everything: sport, ceilidhs, meetings, performances and occasionally emergency use. No single surface excels at all of that.
We specify for the real pattern of use, recommend protective covering for non-sporting events, and give honest advice on where the compromise sits rather than claiming there is not one.
Where a crew is on site anyway, everything worth doing should be done. Deep cleaning, condition inspection, repairs, relining and slip testing can all be completed alongside the main work at marginal extra cost.
We suggest that combination openly, and where neighbouring facilities book together the mobilisation is shared and everybody pays less.
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
School work is governed by a date that does not move, and everything else is arranged around it.
A full sand and seal of a typical school hall takes one to two weeks, which fits comfortably into a summer holiday. Smaller halls and screen and recoat work fit into a half term. Easter and Christmas suit shorter jobs, though the drying conditions in midwinter need allowing for rather than ignoring.
Summer slots go early. Schools that ring in June are usually looking at the following year, and we would far rather have the conversation in January when there is still choice about dates. Trusts planning several halls should be thinking a full year ahead.
What makes these jobs work is preparation rather than long hours. We survey properly so nothing unexpected appears once the finish comes off, we order materials in advance, we staff the job to the programme instead of spreading a team thin, and we build cure times into the schedule rather than treating them as spare. The hall is back for the first day of term because it was planned to be.
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.
Slip resistance is the one performance characteristic of a sports floor that can be measured objectively, and it is worth having the number rather than an assurance.
The pendulum test is the recognised method in the United Kingdom. A weighted arm with a rubber slider swings across the surface and the resistance is recorded, giving a pendulum test value. Sports surfaces are expected to sit within a defined range: too low and players slip, too high and the shoe binds, which brings its own injury risk.
We carry out testing on floors we have worked on and on floors we have not, and we provide the certificate. It is worth having in three situations in particular. After a refinish, so you can demonstrate the floor was handed over correctly. Where a floor has been reported as slippery, so you know whether it genuinely is. And where an insurer, a governing body or a facilities audit has asked for evidence.
Where a test comes back low, the cause is usually polish build up or a worn seal, and both are fixable.
The complaints that bring people to us are usually about how a floor feels rather than how it looks, and feel comes from the structure.
A hall with dead spots, where a section feels lifeless underfoot, has almost always lost resilience below the boards. A pad has compressed, a batten has cracked, or a cradle has failed. The fix is local: we lift the boards over the affected area, replace the failed components and relay. The rest of the floor is untouched.
Squeaks and movement generally mean loose fixings or battens that have shifted, and again the repair is targeted rather than wholesale.
What matters is that these are structural problems and sanding does nothing for them. A floor refinished without addressing a failed subfloor looks superb and still feels wrong, and the money is largely wasted. We check underneath at survey for exactly that reason, and we will tell you when a floor needs structural work before it needs a new finish.
Highland work reaches us from school sports halls, community leisure facilities and a large number of village and club buildings, and the planning matters more here than almost anywhere.
Journeys within the region take considerably longer than the map suggests, so we programme this work as continuous blocks and bring everything we need with us: machinery, abrasives, coatings and spares. Nothing can be collected in the afternoon, which means the job has to be thought through completely before we set off. In practice that makes remote projects more tightly planned than local ones, not less.
School halls are the largest group, and in many communities the school hall is the only substantial indoor sports space, so it takes curriculum sport, club training and community use on the same floor.
Community and village halls follow, and those old timber floors usually have far more life left than anyone expects.
Where several facilities in a region are considering work, sequencing them into one trip makes a genuine difference to cost. It is always worth mentioning if you know of another.
Highland enquiries have a particular character, because the halls here do more work than their timetables suggest and get looked at less often.
The most common situation is a school hall that has gone fifteen or twenty years without a proper refinish, largely because nobody local does this work and it has never been easy to arrange. Those floors usually have plenty of board depth left and restore dramatically, though staining in the traffic lanes may not fully lift after that long.
The second is community halls serving a wide area, where the damage is fine scoring from chairs and tables under decades of polish rather than concentrated sports wear.
The third is moisture, which matters more in buildings that are unheated for long periods and then used intensively. We take readings as a genuine diagnostic step, because a finish applied over a damp floor will fail whatever else is done correctly.
Sequencing several halls into one trip makes all of this considerably more affordable.
Price follows the size of the hall, the condition of the existing floor and the specification you choose rather than the postcode. Refurbishing a sound floor costs a fraction of replacing it, which is why we always price that route first. The survey is free and the quotation is fixed in writing.
Yes. Coverage is genuinely national, and where several facilities in one area need work, booking together shares the mobilisation and reduces the cost for each of them.
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.
Every two to three years for most halls. Baselines and service areas wear first, so courts become uneven in appearance long before the floor itself needs attention.
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.
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, in advance and specific to the job rather than a generic template. We also supply COSHH sheets for every product, insurance certificates and DBS details for staff on school sites.
Yes. Scheduled deep cleaning, screen and recoat visits, minor repairs, remarking and an annual written condition inspection. It is considerably cheaper than reacting when a floor has already failed.
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. Logos are painted from your own artwork between coats of seal so they wear with the floor rather than scuffing off. It costs least while the floor is already open for a refinish.
Book a free survey of your floor in Highlands 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.