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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Lincolnshire and across the UK. We work across a large geography here, which makes efficient programming and honest reporting central to how we operate.
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
Every survey produces a document rather than a verbal impression: moisture readings taken at multiple points, the condition of the boards and the depth remaining above the tongue, sub-floor observations, the state of the markings against current specifications, and entrance-zone assessment.
Against each finding sits a recommendation and a firm cost, ranked by urgency. It is written to be used, whether that means securing a budget, supporting a funding bid or simply deciding what can wait.
A great deal of school and community flooring work depends on grant funding, and applications are frequently weakened by vague specifications and estimated costs.
We provide the technical detail and firm costings such applications require, including the condition evidence that demonstrates need. We cannot influence the outcome, but we can make sure the flooring element of a bid is properly evidenced rather than a placeholder figure.
Where several facilities in an area need work, booking together is materially cheaper than each arranging separately. Mobilisation is shared, machinery moves a short distance rather than returning to base, and the programme runs continuously.
We are happy to coordinate that between separate organisations, and to quote each individually so nobody is committed to anybody else. It is simply a better use of everyone’s money.
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
Basketball wears a floor in two rectangles. The keys take every rebound, post move and landing, and the finish there can be through to bare timber while the rest of the court still looks respectable.
We mark to current FIBA dimensions: a 28 by 15 metre court with the three point line at 6.75 metres from the centre of the basket, reducing to 6.6 metres in the corners. The restricted area is a rectangle with a no charge semi circle, not the trapezoid still found in many older halls, which is usually the giveaway that a court has not been set out properly in decades.
Sole marking is the other characteristic problem. Basketball shoes grip, and that grip transfers rubber across the whole surface. On a well sealed floor it cleans off. Where the seal has gone thin it works into open grain and stops coming out.
A coloured key or a crest at centre court is applied between coats so it wears with the floor rather than scuffing off, and it costs least while the floor is already open.
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.
The question we are asked most often, and the answer comes down to three measurements rather than an opinion.
The first is the remaining wear layer. Every full sand takes timber off, and a floor that has been through many cycles may be close to its fixings. Once a sander reaches the tongue the board is finished, and nothing changes that.
The second is the structure. Isolated failed pads and battens are routine repairs. A system that has failed widely, or one that never suited the hall, is a different proposition.
The third is moisture. A slab with an active problem will destroy any floor laid on it, new or refurbished, until the cause is dealt with.
If the wear layer is adequate, the structure is largely sound and the slab is dry, refurbishment is almost always better value and will give many more years. Where those things are not true we say so plainly, because a refurbishment on a failing floor is money spent twice.
The greenest sports floor is almost always the one already in the building, and that is worth saying plainly when so many are replaced unnecessarily.
A timber sports floor that is refinished rather than replaced avoids the manufacture and transport of an entire new floor, and it avoids sending the existing one to landfill. Given that a well built sprung floor can be refinished five or six times across its life, the difference over thirty years is substantial.
The coatings have improved too. Modern water based two pack systems have far lower solvent content than the finishes used twenty years ago, which matters for the people applying them and for the building afterwards. Low emission systems are available where a specification calls for them, and we will discuss the trade offs honestly, because the toughest finishes are not always the lowest emission ones.
Where a floor genuinely has to be replaced, timber remains a renewable material and the old boards can often be recovered rather than skipped.
Lincolnshire is a large, largely rural county, and the work comes to us predominantly from school sports halls and community buildings rather than big leisure estates.
School halls are the biggest group, and in many communities the school hall doubles as the main indoor sports space for the surrounding area. That means curriculum sport, club training and community lettings all on the same floor, which wears a finish considerably faster than the timetable alone suggests.
We completed work at De Wint School in the county, and it is a fair example of the type: a hall in constant use, a finish that had gone too long between refurbishments, and a fixed window in which to work.
Village halls and church halls are the second group and the county has a great many. Those timber floors are usually a century old with plenty of depth left, buried under decades of polish.
Because journeys within the county take a while, we plan work here as continuous blocks and bring everything with us rather than expecting to collect materials locally.
De Wint School is our in county project and it illustrates the type of hall we are most often asked to look at in Lincolnshire.
It is a hall that does everything: curriculum sport, club training and community lettings, all on the same floor. That volume of mixed use wears a finish considerably faster than a timetable suggests, and by the time we saw it the seal had worn through where the traffic runs and dirt had begun working into open timber.
The floor was sanded back to bare timber, damaged boards were cut out and replaced with matching timber laid to the same grain direction, and the hall was resealed. The markings were set out fresh from measured governing body dimensions rather than traced from the faded originals, and redundant sets came off while the floor was open at no extra cost.
The constraint was the term date, as it always is. The hall was back for the first day because the programme was built to that date from the start.
Court relining can be done either way, and the cost difference between them is larger than most facilities expect.
Marking during a sand and seal is always the best value. The floor is already back to bare timber, the setting out sits inside a programme you are paying for anyway, and the lines finish under the new lacquer where they are protected. There is no second closure and no second mobilisation.
As a standalone visit, relining is still a modest job. A typical multi sport hall takes two to three days including preparation, setting out, painting and the seal coat over the top. That is a genuine option where the floor finish is sound and only the line marking has gone.
What is not worth doing is applying markings onto a finished floor and leaving them exposed. It is quicker and cheaper on the day, and it is why so many halls need remarking every few years. If your last set of lines lifted within a season or two, that is almost certainly what happened to them.
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.
Full sports halls, multi-court leisure facilities, specialist court installations and whole-estate programmes. If you are unsure whether your project fits, call and we will tell you straight away rather than wasting your time.
Yes. Overnight shifts, weekend blocks, phased sections and holiday programmes are all standard. We agree which sessions are affected before anything is booked out.
Compressed wood-composite blocks laid in a brick-like pattern, common in halls built from the 1950s to the 1980s. It cannot be sanded like timber and needs a specialist coating system instead.
Usually because the expansion gaps at the perimeter have closed or been blocked, or because moisture is coming up through the slab. Both need diagnosing before refinishing, or the cause simply repeats.
Regularly. We tender for frameworks, price on schedules of rates, and provide the full procurement documentation set including insurances, quality procedures and safeguarding arrangements.
Yes. We work as the specialist flooring element within refurbishment schemes and are used to main contractor site rules, inductions, permits and progress reporting.
Dust mop daily to lift grit, damp mop with a neutral cleaner made for sealed sports timber, and never use polish, wax or anything promising shine. We hand over written guidance with every job.
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.
Yes, provided it is set up correctly and picks the water up rather than leaving it standing. We are happy to check your machine settings while we are on site.
Book a free survey of your floor in Lincolnshire 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.