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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Leeds and across the UK. We are frequently specified here for premium timber installations, including full Junckers solid-beech systems of the kind fitted in elite competition venues.
We are specialists rather than generalists, which after nearly forty years means a depth of knowledge on sports and commercial timber floors that a general contractor cannot match. Every stage is completed in-house. We do not quote for domestic work; Ryan’s Restorations handles that side.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Junckers, Boen and Havwoods sit at the top of the sports timber market, and the difference is not marketing. Solid beech and maple systems offer greater dimensional stability, more consistent grain and considerably more depth for future refinishing than budget alternatives.
That last point is where the economics turn. A premium floor can be sanded and resealed several times more than a thin-wear-layer product, so the cost per year of service is frequently lower despite the higher installation price. We fit the full range and will show you the lifecycle numbers rather than just the quote.
The build-up beneath the boards decides how a floor performs. A cradle system suspends the floor on resilient pads for high shock absorption, suited to serious sport. A sports batten construction is the dependable all-rounder for school and community halls. Pad and board is shallower where height is limited. A duo batten system doubles up for greater resilience and consistency.
We specify against the sports, the level of play and the height available, and explain the trade-off in plain terms rather than product language.
Warranties in this trade are frequently less useful than they appear, because the surface manufacturer covers the surface, the installer covers the installation, and any dispute falls into the gap between them.
Because we carry out every element ourselves, from sub-floor preparation through to the final coat, the cover applies to the whole system rather than one component. We set out exactly what is included, and for how long, before you commit rather than in the small print afterwards.
The sports hall floor at De Wint School had reached the end of its seal: grey through the middle, markings closer to guesswork than instruction, and a surface that felt slippery however often it was cleaned.
We sanded it back to clean timber, repaired what needed repairing, resealed and re-marked. The hall reopened with a deep, glossy finish that reads as newly installed, delivered inside a planned holiday window.
~ 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
Gym floors fail differently from every other floor in a building, because the damage is point loading rather than even wear.
Dropped dumbbells, plate loaded machines dragged rather than lifted, benches shuffled across boards and racks bolted down and later moved all leave dents and gouges. Sanding removes a surface but a deep dent stays a dent, and part of our survey is telling you which marks will come out and which will not.
Chalk and sweat are the other half. Both soak into timber wherever the seal has worn through, and chalk in open grain can leave a permanent grey cast in the lifting area.
Rubber matting laid straight onto a sealed floor and left down for years traps moisture and can bond to the lacquer, so lifting it takes the finish with it. It is one of the main reasons gym floors arrive in worse condition than the sports hall next door.
The answer is usually a harder finish, an extra coat in the free weight zone, and a proper lifting platform where the weights actually land.
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.
Almost every hall we work in has a stage, and it is usually in worse condition than the hall floor because of what gets dragged across it.
Stages are often a different construction and a different timber from the room they sit in, sometimes with a hollow void beneath for resonance. That changes how they are sanded and what they can take, and it is worth knowing before a machine goes on.
The finish is a different decision too. A matt or dead matt seal kills the reflections that stage lighting otherwise produces, and it hides the scuffing that scenery and staging leave. Some venues want a stage that can be painted for productions, which changes the specification again and needs discussing at the outset rather than afterwards.
We generally recommend doing the stage at the same time as the hall. It costs considerably less than two separate visits, it gives a consistent appearance, and the stage is usually the part that most needs it.
Every quotation follows a site visit, because a sports floor holds information you cannot get from a photograph and a price given without it is a price that will change.
We take moisture readings in the boards and, where there is any reason for doubt, in the slab beneath. Moisture from below is the single most common cause of a new finish failing early, and it is far cheaper to find before the work than afterwards.
We measure the remaining wear layer. Every full sand removes timber, and a floor that has been through several cycles may be close to its fixings. Knowing where you stand tells you whether this is a floor to refinish now or a floor to plan on replacing in a few years.
We lift a vent or an edge trim and look underneath. Dead spots, squeaks and movement almost always start below the boards, and no amount of work on the surface will touch them.
Then we record the finish, the markings and the condition of the perimeter. The survey takes about an hour and it decides everything that follows.
Leeds gives us a substantial mix of university sport, academy trust estates and city leisure facilities, across building stock spanning more than a century.
University and college facilities are busy year round, with summer conference and external hire filling what would be a shutdown elsewhere. The working windows are narrow and fixed, so those projects are planned months ahead and staffed to complete inside them rather than stretched across a longer period.
Academy and school halls are the largest group by number. We have completed work at Harris Academy and at Hornbury Academy in Wakefield nearby, and the pattern is consistent: halls in constant use, finishes long overdue, and fixed term dates that do not move.
Leisure centres follow, where booking income means overnight working is usually the only practical route.
The older halls in the region often turn out to be Granwood, particularly in schools and church buildings. It needs a specialist approach rather than timber sanding, and most of the floors we are told are finished are nothing of the kind.
Leeds enquiries reflect a building stock that ranges from Victorian school halls to modern university sports centres.
The most frequent is an academy hall where the finish has worn through in the traffic lanes and the markings have faded to the point where officiating is difficult. Those are straightforward refinishes when the boards still have depth, and a survey usually finds more life left than the school expects.
The second is Granwood, which appears regularly in the older school and church halls across the city. It is frequently condemned when it should not be. The blocks are usually sound and restoration costs a fraction of a replacement that would also involve lifting a bitumen bed.
The third is university facilities where the constraint is the window rather than the floor. Those projects are solved by surveying early, ordering ahead and staffing to finish inside the time available.
The honest answer is that we cannot know until we have measured. What we can say is that we price the least expensive effective option as well as the full one, so the decision is yours rather than ours, and that the figure we give you is the figure you pay.
We do, and the wider region with it. Work further from our base is organised as a single concentrated programme so nothing is left unfinished awaiting a return trip, and travel is included in the quoted price.
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. Every survey produces a written report with moisture readings, board condition, recommended work and firm costs, designed to be usable as budget evidence.
A recoat lightly abrades the existing seal and adds fresh coats without touching the timber. A full sand takes the floor back to clean board. The recoat is far cheaper and is the right answer whenever the seal is worn but intact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It depends on board thickness and how much has already been removed. A solid strip floor might take six to eight full sands across its life. We measure the remaining wear layer at survey.
No. We are a commercial contractor working on schools, leisure centres, universities, clubs and public buildings. The machinery, finishes and insurance are different from domestic work.
Book a free survey of your floor in Leeds 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.