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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Oxfordshire and across the UK. Our work here spans historic buildings with original timber and new-build facilities being handed over on tight construction programmes.
This is all we do, and we have been doing it since 1987. Installation, restoration, sanding, sealing, line marking, slip testing and maintenance for commercial and institutional buildings, delivered without subcontractors. Residential projects go to 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
The commonest defect in a brand-new sports floor is moisture, not workmanship. Construction programmes compress, slabs are poured late, and a timber floor is laid over concrete that has not finished drying. Within months the boards cup and the finish fails.
We test rather than assume, and we will say plainly when a slab is not ready. That is an unwelcome message on a tight programme, but it is considerably cheaper than replacing a floor in year two.
Older floors were often laid in timber of a quality that would be prohibitively expensive today, and replacing one with a modern equivalent is frequently a downgrade.
We sand progressively rather than aggressively, match replacement boards by species and grade, and select a finish appropriate to both the building and its use. Where a building is listed we keep interventions sympathetic and can advise on what conservation officers typically accept.
Underfloor heating and timber can coexist, but only if the floor is specified for it. Heat cycling moves timber, and a build-up chosen without accounting for that will gap in winter and tighten in summer until something fails.
Board width, species, moisture content at installation and expansion allowance all have to be planned around the heating. We will tell you plainly if a proposed specification and a heating system are incompatible.
Our installation at Hornbury Academy shows the full process from bare sub-floor through to a finished, fully line-marked hall, delivered to a fixed programme while the school carried on around us.
For anyone weighing a new floor against another patch-up, it is a useful illustration of what the complete journey involves and what it produces.
~ 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 enquiries reach us as a description of a symptom, and there are a few things that let us give a genuinely useful reply rather than a holding one.
Photographs are the most valuable. Two or three of the whole room, and two or three close up of whatever is worrying you, tell us more than several paragraphs. If there is a worn patch, a stain, a lifting board or a dead spot, photograph that specifically.
Approximate dimensions, or just the number of badminton courts, gives us the area. The rough age of the floor and whether anybody knows what is underneath helps. If you have any record of previous work, even a decade old invoice, that is genuinely useful.
Then tell us what the room is used for and when it could realistically be closed. Those two facts shape the recommendation as much as the condition does.
From that we can usually give an informed steer and a budget range before arranging a survey.
A great deal of what we do happens when the building is empty, because for most facilities that is the only way the work can happen at all.
Leisure centres in particular rarely have a fortnight to give up. Booking income stops, members notice, and some of them do not come back. So we work overnight, sealing at the end of a shift so the floor is walkable by opening time, with heavy equipment going back once the finish has hardened properly.
Weekend working suits buildings that are busy on weekdays: offices with sports facilities, universities in term, and community halls with a weekday programme. Bank holiday weekends are particularly useful because they give an extra day of cure time.
Out of hours working costs a little more in labour and it saves considerably more in lost income and disruption. We will quote both ways so you can weigh one against the other rather than being told what your only option is.
Key holding, alarm codes and access arrangements are agreed in writing before we start.
Facilities managers are usually working to a figure set before anybody looked at the floor, so it helps to know what moves it.
Area is the obvious factor, and bigger halls are cheaper per square metre because mobilisation is spread further. A four court hall almost always works out better value per metre than a single studio.
Condition matters more than size. A screen and recoat is a fraction of the cost of a full sand. Board repairs, replacing damaged sections and dealing with a failed subfloor all add, and they are the items that appear once the old lacquer comes off.
Markings are priced by what you need rather than what is there. Removing three redundant sets makes the hall clearer and the job cheaper.
Access and hours are the last variable. A hall we can work in continuously through a holiday costs less than the same hall done overnight around evening bookings. We quote both where it helps you weigh disruption against money.
Not every sports floor is timber, and the synthetic surfaces have a genuine place rather than being a cheap alternative.
Point elastic vinyl systems deflect where they are loaded rather than across an area, which makes them forgiving underfoot and well suited to halls with a very mixed timetable. They need no refinishing, they clean easily, and they come in a range of colours that lets a hall be designed rather than simply floored. They have a finite life and are replaced rather than restored when it ends.
Linoleum is the older relation, still found in a great many school halls, and it can often be deep cleaned and resealed rather than replaced.
Polyurethane and modified epoxy systems are seamless, poured or applied as coatings, and are particularly useful over Granwood and cementitious substrates. They can be fully recoated in a new colour with fresh markings, which turns a tired hall into a refurbished one without touching what is underneath.
We work across all of them, and we will tell you honestly when your existing surface is worth keeping.
Oxfordshire gives us a distinctive mix, weighted towards university and college sport, independent schools and a substantial rural stock of village and church halls.
Collegiate and university sport is a significant strand. These facilities run year round, with conference and summer school use filling the period a school would be closed, so the windows are narrow and fixed and the work is planned a long way ahead.
Independent school sports halls, gymnasia and squash courts follow. Expectations of finish quality are high, the work goes into fixed holiday windows, and much of it is preventative screen and recoat rather than full refinishing, which is the cheapest way to run a floor.
We completed work at St George Ascot nearby, including a Granwood restoration that others had said was beyond saving, and it remains one of the projects we point to most often.
Village halls and church halls make up the rest, and those old timber floors are usually far better than they look under decades of polish.
St George School in Ascot is our closest comparable project for Oxfordshire, both geographically and in the kind of building involved.
The hall had a Granwood floor that more than one contractor had condemned as beyond saving. Granwood is a composite block laid in bitumen rather than timber, with no grain and no wear layer in the usual sense, and treating it as timber destroys it. Replacement would also have meant lifting a bitumen bed, which carries cost and complication that a replacement quotation does not always make obvious.
We assessed the blocks, lifted and rebedded the loose ones, replaced those that had broken up, and prepared the surface with appropriate abrasives rather than aggressive sanding. The floor was then coated with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates, with the line markings applied within the system.
The client now has a hall floor that looks renewed with years of life left. It is the job we point to most often when somebody has been told their Granwood is finished.
When we reline a hall we set the court markings out to the dimensions the governing bodies actually publish, which is not always what is currently painted on the floor.
A netball court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with 50 millimetre lines, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game. A basketball court is 28 by 15 metres with the three point arc at 6.75 metres, and the restricted area is now a rectangle rather than the trapezoid still found in many older halls. Badminton is 13.4 by 6.1 metres for doubles, with the short service line 1.98 metres from the net.
Those figures matter because players move between venues. A court marked slightly out plays differently from every other court the same team uses, and nobody can ever quite say why. Relining from measured dimensions rather than tracing the old lines is what corrects it.
Where a hall is genuinely too small for a full size court, we scale it properly or mark a junior format rather than compressing a senior layout into a space that cannot hold it safely.
Considerably less than most people expect, because restoration rather than replacement is usually the answer. A full sand and seal typically costs a small fraction of a new floor. The survey is free, the quotation is fixed, and nothing is added later without your agreement.
The full area and the counties around it. Where a facility is some way from us, we bring all machinery and materials at the outset and complete everything within one agreed window.
Yes, and it usually costs less. We survey the estate together, apply one specification and schedule the sites into a single programme with one point of contact.
Usually straightforward on a sound floor. Removing old lines completely requires sanding, so we will plan the new layout to work with what is already there and explain the options.
A well-installed and properly maintained timber floor can serve for decades because it can be renewed repeatedly. Synthetic surfaces typically run fifteen to twenty years before replacement.
Photographs of the room and of anything specific that worries you, approximate dimensions or the number of badminton courts, the age of the floor if known, and when the room could realistically be closed.
Yes. We survey, take moisture readings, measure the remaining board depth and look at the structure, then quote a fixed sum broken down by element. There is no charge and no obligation.
Almost always polish or the wrong cleaning product building up, or a seal worn smooth in the traffic lanes. Both are fixable, and both should be dealt with before somebody is injured.
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.
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.
Because we survey properly we usually know what is coming and allow for it in the quotation as expected work rather than presenting it later as an extra. Genuinely unforeseeable finds are rare.
Book a free survey of your floor in Oxfordshire 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.