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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Kent and across the UK. We work across the county for schools, grammar and independent schools, leisure operators and clubs, on both installation and refurbishment.
Trading since 1987 and family-owned throughout, we handle indoor sports and commercial timber floors from first survey to long-term aftercare, with our own crew and equipment on site at every stage. Domestic and residential projects are the province of 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
This is the decision that determines your budget, and it should be made on evidence rather than appearance. A floor can look finished while the timber beneath is entirely sound, and it can look acceptable while moisture is quietly destroying it from below.
We measure the depth remaining above the tongue, check the sub-floor and take moisture readings, then give you a straight recommendation. In most cases restoration wins comfortably. Where it does not, we show you why rather than asking you to take our word.
The seal determines how long the work lasts and how the floor plays. We use commercial systems from manufacturers such as Bona and Junckers, selected for the workload of the room rather than applied as a standard specification, and built up in the correct number of coats with proper curing between them.
Finish also affects friction, which is a safety matter rather than a preference. Too slick is dangerous; too grippy causes its own injuries. We can verify the result with a pendulum slip test on completion.
Schools that show their facilities to prospective parents are judged on presentation as well as performance, and a grey, worn hall floor undoes a great deal of work elsewhere in the building.
We plan around term dates, fixtures, exams and open days, deliver a finish that stands close inspection, and can seal a school crest beneath the final coats at centre court. The reopening date is fixed in writing so nothing collides with an event already advertised.
Not every floor we save sits in a sports centre. St Katherine’s had the kind of well-loved, well-worn hall floor that carries badminton one evening and a community event the next, and the committee wanted it rescued rather than replaced.
We restored it completely. The hall is now set for another few decades of everything it is asked to do.
~ 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
Most of the wear on a sports floor is caused by what walks in on the bottom of shoes. Grit acts as an abrasive under every footstep, and the seal wears through first in the lane between the door and the equipment store because that is where the grit is thickest.
A good length of entrance matting, three or four strides at least, removes most of it before it reaches the boards. Where the hall opens directly onto a playground or car park, as many Kent school halls do, the matting matters even more, and coastal sites add salt and sand to the mix.
The other half of the answer is dry dust mopping every day, which lifts what the matting misses. Between the two, the seal lasts a year or more longer between recoats, which is the cheapest maintenance saving available to any facility.
Sanding produces a great deal of fine dust, and when a hall is refinished in term time, or during a holiday while the site team and summer schools are still in the building, it has to stay in the hall. Our machines run on continuous extraction with bagged collection, the hall is sealed at every door, and the ventilation serving the room is switched off for the duration.
We agree the access route with your site manager so machinery and waste move without leaving a trail through corridors, and at the end of every shift the hall and the route are vacuumed.
That discipline protects the finish as much as the building. Dust settling into a wet coat of seal is the commonest cause of a rough, cloudy surface, so a clean hall is also a better looking one. Kent’s grammar and independent schools notice the difference on open day.
A floor that feels lifeless in patches, or squeaks and moves underfoot, has a problem below the surface, and no amount of sanding will change how it plays. Sprung floors sit on battens or cradles with resilient pads beneath, and after fifty or sixty years those pads compress, battens split and fixings work loose.
We lift the boards over the affected area only, replace the failed components with matching ones, check levels against the surrounding floor and relay. Once the hall is resealed the repair disappears.
We check beneath the floor at survey for exactly this reason. A hall refinished without attending to a failed structure looks superb for a week and still feels wrong, and the money is largely wasted. The sixties and seventies school halls across Kent are now at the age where this is worth looking for.
A timber sports floor run on a cycle costs a fraction of one run to failure. The cycle is simple. Daily dust mopping and weekly damp cleaning with a neutral product. A screen and recoat every two to three years, which abrades the existing seal lightly and adds a fresh coat while the old one is still intact. A full sand roughly every ten years, when the markings are reset from measured dimensions.
Miss the recoat and the seal wears through in the traffic lanes. Dirt then works into bare timber, and the next job becomes a full sand years earlier than it needed to be.
We offer maintenance agreements for Kent schools and leisure operators that put the recoat visits and an annual inspection into the diary, with the cost known in advance. Bursars like it because it turns an unpredictable capital hit into a small revenue line.
Kent gives us a large volume of school work, including grammar schools, academy trusts and independent schools, alongside leisure operator facilities and a substantial rural stock.
School halls are the biggest group by some margin. The recurring issue is halls that have gone well over a decade 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 the point at which restoration stops being straightforward.
Academy trust estates are common here, and for those a condition survey across all the halls followed by a phased programme is far more useful than reacting site by site.
Leisure centres follow, where keeping the building trading means overnight and weekend working.
Village and church halls make up the rest, and the county has a great many. Those old timber floors are usually in far better shape than they look, and restoring them costs a fraction of what committees expect.
Kent enquiries divide between schools and community buildings, and two projects cover most of what people want to know.
De Wint School is the closest for a curriculum hall. It had gone well past its refinish cycle, with the seal worn through in the traffic lanes and markings faded past easy officiating. The floor was taken back to bare timber, damaged boards replaced, resealed, and remarked from measured governing body dimensions rather than traced from what was there. Redundant sports came off while the floor was open.
St Katherine Hall is the better comparison for community buildings. An old timber floor carrying badminton one evening and a community event the next, under decades of polish that had to be removed chemically before sanding. Underneath was a floor with plenty of depth left, and it is now set for another few decades.
For trusts with several halls, the more useful first step is surveying all of them and producing a costed priority order.
It depends on the area, the condition of the timber, the markings and the working hours. We survey free of charge and return a fixed, itemised quotation so you can see what each part costs. Restoration is almost always far cheaper than replacement.
Yes. We work from the Medway towns to Thanet and Dover, across the Weald, and nationally beyond that. Travel is shown openly in the quotation as its own line, so the price you see is the price you pay.
On timber the lines are sealed under the lacquer, so they last as long as the finish and are redone at each screen and recoat or full sand. Lines painted on top of a finished floor lift within a season, which is why we never apply them that way.
Yes. Every survey produces a written report with photographs, measurements, moisture readings and a ranked list of what the floor needs now, what can wait and what needs nothing. The fixed quotation is built from it, so the two documents match.
Yes, and most Kent school work goes there. The summer window is around six weeks and fills early, so we ask schools to confirm by spring. Screen and recoat visits fit comfortably into Easter or October half term, needing only a few days including cure.
Yes. During a full sand the old lines come off with the finish and only the sports you use go back on. On synthetic floors we remove redundant lines with the appropriate method. Fewer, clearer lines make a hall easier to teach in and to officiate.
Usually polish or the wrong cleaning product has built a film on the surface, or the seal has worn smooth where traffic is heaviest. Both are correctable. We can pendulum test the floor to confirm the readings and then deep clean or recoat as required.
A typical solid board floor gives four or five full sands over its life, depending on the depth of timber above the tongue. We measure that at survey. Running the floor on a screen and recoat cycle between sands is what makes it last fifty years or more.
Book a free survey of your sports hall floor anywhere in Kent. We will measure it, explain what it needs and give you a fixed price and a firm date for handing the hall back. Call 01823 674562 or message us.