This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website: Find out more.
Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Norfolk and across the UK. A good deal of our work is for rural schools and community facilities where a single visit has to accomplish everything.
Our clients are schools, academy trusts, universities, leisure operators, councils and clubs, and have been since 1987. We cover the full lifecycle of a floor with our own team rather than a chain of subcontractors. Private homes are outside our scope and are served by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Where a facility is a long way from anywhere, a contractor who has to return for a second stage is an expensive contractor. So work at distance is planned as a complete programme: survey, repairs, sanding, sealing, marking and any testing completed within a single agreed window.
Everything is priced before we travel, so there are no additional mobilisation costs appearing later and nothing left unfinished waiting on a return trip.
The first few metres inside the door take more punishment than the centre of any hall, and they are where slip incidents actually occur. Grit walked in from car parks and paths is abrasive in a way sport is not, and it cuts through a seal years early.
Effective matting, sensible barrier zones and the right cleaning routine address the cause rather than the symptom. We advise on all three, and pay particular attention to entrance areas during slip testing.
Community buildings work to tight budgets and committee timescales, and they are frequently sold work they do not need. We would rather give the cheap answer and be trusted with the expensive one later.
If a floor needs nothing more than a deep clean, that is what we will say. If it needs a recoat rather than a full sand, we will price the recoat. The survey report sets out the options with firm costs so a committee can decide with evidence rather than pressure.
The sports hall at St George’s had a Granwood block floor that decades of use had left dull and tired. Granwood cannot be sanded like timber, so we restored it correctly: careful preparation, a modified epoxy coating system and crisp new markings.
The school kept a serviceable floor out of a skip and spent a fraction of what replacement would have cost.
~ 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
Timber takes up and gives off moisture with the air around it, and Norfolk halls feel that more than most. A building a few miles from the coast lives in damper air for much of the year, then dries hard once the heating runs through a long winter. The boards follow, swelling in autumn and shrinking by February.
Some movement is normal and a well laid floor allows for it, with perimeter gaps sized to the species and board width. Trouble starts when those gaps are lost behind later skirting or a threshold, or when an unheated hall is suddenly used hard in summer and the floor has nowhere to go.
We check the expansion allowance at every survey, and where a hall swings widely we advise on ventilation after use, because the cheapest fix for a moving floor is a steadier room.
A soft spot, a board that clicks underfoot, or an area where the ball dies are all symptoms of the same thing: something has failed below the surface. Battens rot where a leak has run under the floor, rubber pads perish and go hard after thirty years, and cradles crack where furniture has been dropped in the same place for decades.
Resurfacing does nothing for any of this. The seal will look new and the floor will still feel dead. So when a survey finds it, we lift boards in the affected area, replace the failed batten, pad or cradle, and relay the same boards so the repair vanishes under the finish.
In older Norfolk school halls this is often the whole job, and it costs far less than the replacement a general builder tends to suggest.
A hall marked for six sports can carry more than a kilometre of line, and if every set is the same weight and colour the floor becomes a puzzle. So a marking scheme starts with a hierarchy. The sport played most gets the boldest, clearest colour. Occasional sports get thinner or paler lines that recede until they are needed.
Convention helps. Badminton is usually white or yellow, basketball black or red, netball blue, volleyball green, and five a side often orange or red, but the rule that matters is contrast against everything else already on the floor, checked under the hall lights before anything is painted.
Where a Norfolk hall has gathered sports nobody plays any more, removing those sets during a refinish costs nothing and clears the floor more than any new colour could.
Norfolk brings us a largely rural mix, weighted towards school sports halls, community buildings and club facilities rather than large leisure estates.
School halls are the biggest group, and in a great many Norfolk communities the school hall is also the main indoor sports space for the area, taking curriculum sport, club training and community lettings on the same floor. That volume of mixed use wears a finish faster than the timetable suggests.
Village halls and church halls are the second group and the county has an exceptional number of them. Those timber floors are frequently a century old, buried under decades of polish and scored by chair and table legs, with plenty of board depth left underneath. We worked on St Katherine Hall, and it is a good illustration of the type: a well loved, well worn floor that carries badminton one evening and a community event the next, restored rather than replaced.
Because journeys within the county take a while, we plan work here as continuous blocks and bring everything with us.
Norfolk enquiries are dominated by rural halls, and the problems reflect that.
The most common is a village or church hall with a timber floor laid a century ago, buried under decades of polish and scored by chairs and tables going out and back several times a week. That polish has to come off chemically before sanding, and underneath there is almost always plenty of board depth left. Those floors transform completely.
The second is school halls that also serve as the community sports space, taking far more traffic than curriculum use alone, and arriving overdue as a result.
The third is moisture. Older buildings with solid floors and limited damp proofing need proper readings before anything is sealed, and it is one of the few things that cannot be corrected afterwards cheaply.
We quote by element throughout so hall committees can see exactly what each part costs and phase it if the funds require.
Because Norfolk halls are often an hour or more from the next job, a good enquiry saves everyone a wasted journey. Three things let us give a meaningful indication before we visit.
The first is photographs: the whole hall from a doorway, a close view of the worst worn area, the perimeter where the floor meets the wall, and any damage or staining. The second is approximate dimensions, even paced out. The third is the history you know, such as when it was last sanded or sealed, what the cleaners use, and whether polish has ever gone on.
With those we can say whether you are looking at a recoat, a full sand or a repair, and give a budget range. The free survey then turns that into a fixed price with every element listed.
A recoat of a sound floor is the cheapest outcome, a full sand with repairs sits in the middle, and a new sprung floor is the largest spend by some way. We price whichever your floor needs after a free survey, itemised so a committee or bursar can see each element.
No. We work across the whole of the UK and plan distant jobs as one continuous block, bringing every machine and material with us. Travel is included in the quote from the outset, so a rural site pays no more per square metre than one near a motorway.
When the seal has worn through to bare timber in the traffic lanes, when dirt has settled into open grain, or when boards need cutting out and replacing. If the finish is dull but unbroken, a screen and recoat restores it for far less.
Walk on it in socks or clean trainers after twenty four hours. Leave seventy two hours or more before returning trampolines, mats, staging and stacked chairs, as the seal is still curing beneath the surface. We confirm exact timings for the product used.
Yes. Every job gets a site specific risk assessment and method statement, plus COSHH sheets and our insurance certificates, sent before we arrive. For schools we add DBS details for the team. It is the same pack regardless of how small the hall is.
Speak to us the winter before the summer you want. Summer and Easter slots fill first, half terms are shorter and suit recoats, and Norfolk schools sharing a hall with community lettings need to warn their hirers early as well.
Yes. We carry out pendulum slip testing at points across the hall, including entrances and the busiest lanes, and issue a certificate you can file with insurers or a governing body. It can be done alongside a survey or an annual inspection visit.
Our workmanship and the products we apply. If a seal fails or a repair lifts through something we did, we come back and put it right. It does not cover damage from leaks, polish applied against our guidance, or a slab we advised was too wet.
Ask us for a free survey of your hall anywhere in Norfolk. We visit once, measure everything, and send a written report with a fixed price and the earliest date we can start. Call 01823 674562 or send a message.