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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Northamptonshire and across the UK. Its position at the centre of the motorway network makes multi-site programmes here unusually efficient to deliver.
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 We do not quote for domestic work; Ryan’s Restorations handles that side.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
Mobilisation is a real cost in this trade: getting crews, machinery and materials to site, and back again. On a single hall it is absorbed into the price; across several sites booked separately it is paid several times over.
Grouping work, whether across one estate or between neighbouring facilities that book together, spreads that cost and reduces the price for everyone involved. We will actively suggest it where we can see the opportunity.
Most British sports halls cannot accommodate full-size courts for every sport they host, so the practical question is how to fit the best possible court into the space while retaining safe run-off to the walls.
Run-off is a safety requirement, not a nicety: players run out of court at speed. Where a full court will not fit we mark a correctly proportioned reduced court rather than squeezing the dimensions, and explain what that means for competitive use.
A sports floor has to work with the equipment that goes into it: net post sockets, badminton and volleyball fixings, and the covers that keep them flush and safe when not in use.
These are frequently an afterthought and then a permanent nuisance. We coordinate socket positions with the marking layout during installation and refurbishment, so posts land where the courts actually are and covers sit level with the surface.
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
Netball is played on hard stops. The footwork rule means players land, plant and pivot rather than running through the ball, which puts a specific demand on the surface.
Grip has to be predictable. A player receiving in the goal circle needs to stop dead and trust the floor, and a surface polished smooth through the centre third is a genuine injury risk rather than an inconvenience.
A full court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with a 0.9 metre centre circle and goal circles of 4.9 metre radius. Lines are 50 millimetres wide, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game.
England Netball asks for 3.05 metres of run off for competitive play, which few school halls achieve. Where a hall cannot take a full court we mark a proportionally reduced court or lay out for a junior format, rather than marking something tight to the walls that is unsafe to play on.
Not every tired floor needs taking back to bare timber, and knowing the difference saves facilities a great deal of money.
A screen and recoat is a light abrasion of the existing finish followed by a fresh top coat. It restores grip and appearance, it takes a fraction of the time, and it costs a fraction of the price. It works when the seal is worn but still intact across the floor.
A full sand removes everything back to bare timber and rebuilds the finish from scratch. It is the right answer when the lacquer has worn through in the traffic lanes and dirt is sitting in open grain, when there are repairs to make, or when the markings need setting out fresh.
As a rule of thumb, a well maintained hall wants a screen and recoat every two to three years and a full sand roughly every ten. Sticking to that keeps the boards alive far longer, because every full sand removes timber you cannot replace. A floor refinished every three years will run out of wear layer decades early.
Sports floors are full of holes, and how they are dealt with says a good deal about the quality of a job.
Badminton and volleyball posts sit in floor sockets, and those sockets have to finish flush with the surface and stay watertight. During a refinish we lift the covers, clean out years of accumulated debris and dust, protect the sockets from sealer, and reset them to the new floor level. Sanding around a socket cover and sealing over it is the shortcut, and it leaves a raised ring that catches feet and machinery.
Basketball post fixings, wall bar mountings and floor boxes for power get the same treatment. Where a fitting has been removed at some point and the hole filled badly, we make it good properly with matching timber rather than filler.
Inspection covers, expansion joints and threshold trims all need setting to the finished level too. It is detail work and it is largely invisible when done well, which is rather the point.
People are often surprised by how much of a floor project happens before a machine is switched on, so it is worth setting out what the first day actually looks like.
We arrive early and start by clearing and protecting. Equipment comes off the floor, wall bars and fittings are sheeted, socket covers are lifted, and the working area is screened from the rest of the building. Doors and air handling routes that need isolating are dealt with at this point, in agreement with your site team.
Then we take a final set of readings. Moisture in the boards, and the slab if there is any doubt, because conditions can change between survey and start.
Only then does sanding begin, and the first pass is the one that tells us what we are really dealing with. Anything we flagged as likely at survey usually appears here. If something genuinely unexpected turns up, you hear about it that day rather than in an invoice later.
Northamptonshire brings us a mix of academy trust estates, leisure facilities, university sport and a good number of community buildings.
Trust work is the pattern we see most. Where one organisation holds a dozen or more sports halls, a condition survey across the whole estate producing a costed priority order is far more useful than reacting hall by hall. It lets the spend be phased across budget years and stops several floors reaching crisis in the same summer.
Individual school halls arrive for the familiar reasons: a finish worn through in the traffic lanes, markings that have been copied rather than set out for several remarks running, or a hall that has become slippery and is now an insurance question rather than a nuisance.
Leisure and community sports centres follow, where booking income means overnight and weekend working.
We completed the refinish at Aston University nearby, which is a fair illustration of how we handle a busy facility with no long shutdown: plan to the window, staff it properly, and hand back on the agreed date.
Northamptonshire enquiries divide between trust estates and individual halls, and the questions asked are quite different.
Trusts generally want a view across several buildings rather than a price for one. A condition survey covering every hall, producing a costed priority order, is far more useful than quoting the floor that happened to fail first, and it lets the spend be phased across budget years.
Individual halls arrive with the usual symptoms: a finish worn through in the traffic lanes, markings faded past the point of officiating, or a floor that has become slippery and is now an insurance question.
The third recurring item is markings that have drifted. Courts remarked by copying the previous set move over time, and halls that have been done several times that way are frequently out. We set out from measured governing body dimensions, which often corrects errors nobody had thought to check.
Colour is the part of a relining scheme most often decided badly, because it gets chosen from a chart in an office rather than on the floor under the hall lights.
Most halls have been refitted with LED lighting in the last decade, and LEDs render colour very differently from the fluorescent tubes they replaced. Two shades that look clearly distinct on a sample card can merge almost completely under the actual lighting, which is how halls end up with court markings nobody can follow.
So we bring samples and look at them in the room with the lights on before anything is ordered. It takes ten minutes and it prevents the most common complaint we hear about other contractors work.
The floor itself matters too. A pale maple floor takes different colours from a mid tone vinyl or a dark polyurethane, and a scheme designed for one will not necessarily read on the other. Where a hall is being recoloured as well as relined, the two decisions have to be made together rather than in sequence.
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.
We can provide the specification detail and firm costings that Condition Improvement Fund and Sport England style applications require, and our survey reports are written with that use in mind.
Our machinery runs with dust extraction throughout and we manage containment so the rest of the building keeps operating. It is a practical requirement in occupied premises, not a courtesy.
A single-court hall is typically four to five days including sanding, repairs, sealing, marking and curing, which fits inside a school holiday. The programme and a fixed reopening date are confirmed in writing before we start.
Yes, and it is routine. Split, damaged and water damaged boards are cut out and replaced with matching timber laid to the same grain direction, so the repair disappears once the floor is sanded.
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.
A light abrasion of the existing finish followed by a fresh top coat. It restores grip and appearance at a fraction of the cost of a full sand, and it works whenever the seal is worn but still 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.
Satin or matt in almost every case. Gloss looks impressive at handover and shows every scuff within weeks, as well as producing noticeable glare under modern lighting.
Yes. We carry out pendulum slip resistance testing and provide the certificate, which is worth having on file for insurers, governing bodies and facilities audits.
Book a free survey of your floor in Northamptonshire 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.