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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
An inspection is the least expensive thing we do and often the most useful. We walk the floor, measure the seal depth and the timber above the tongue, take moisture readings, check beneath the boards for failed pads or battens, review the markings and fittings, and photograph every defect.
The report ranks the findings into what needs attention this year, what can wait, and what needs nothing beyond the cleaning regime, with a cost against each. It reads as a budget paper, not a sales document.
For an Oxfordshire college with a hall, a studio and squash courts of different ages, or a trust with several schools, an inspection across the whole estate produces a phased programme rather than a run of emergencies. It also gives a head of estates a record to hand on when the role changes, which on a large campus it regularly does.
Almost every hall has a stage, and the stage is usually in worse condition than the hall floor. Scenery is dragged across it, screws are driven into it for sets and then left, lighting stands and pianos concentrate their weight on small feet, and it is rarely on anyone’s maintenance list.
We sand and reseal stages alongside the hall, filling screw holes, replacing split boards and specifying a finish that suits the use. A drama space wants a matt black or dark seal with controlled slide. A stage used for assemblies and speech days wants a durable satin that reads well from the floor.
Doing the stage in the same visit as the hall costs far less than a separate mobilisation, and Oxfordshire’s older school and college halls, with their timber stages and heavy use for performance, benefit from being treated as one space.
Much of our public sector work arrives through a formal process, and we are set up for it. We respond to tenders and requests for quotation with the pricing schedule, method statements, insurance evidence, references and programme information a procurement team needs, in the format asked for and by the deadline.
Where a council or a college in Oxfordshire uses a framework, we can work within it or supply the compliance material for a direct award below threshold. For trusts running three quotes, we provide a fully itemised figure so the comparison is like for like.
The thing we ask is that the specification follows a survey. A tender written around a floor nobody has measured produces prices that cannot be compared, because each bidder guesses differently at what lies under the finish. We will survey without charge so the document goes out with a scope everyone is pricing the same way.
A fitness suite fails a floor differently from any hall, because the damage is point loading. A loaded bar or dropped dumbbell punches through a finish and often the material beneath it, and a floor chosen for a sports hall has no answer to that.
In free weight areas we install or repair heavy duty rubber tiles or rolls over a firm base, with a dedicated lifting platform where the loads call for one. Cardio and class areas take a lighter vinyl or sealed timber finish, with the transition between the two detailed to avoid a trip edge.
Where an Oxfordshire school or college has converted a former classroom or store into a gym, the existing floor was never designed for weights, and we assess the substrate before recommending anything. The base beneath the rubber matters more than the tile itself.
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.
A hall carrying five sports is only readable if the sets are ranked. The main sport takes the strongest colour in unbroken lines. Secondary sports take colours that separate clearly under the hall’s own lighting, and where two lines run close together one is broken so players know which to follow.
We begin by asking what is taught and booked, because a set of lines nobody has used in years adds nothing but confusion, and removing it during a refinish costs nothing.
Lighting changes everything. A colour scheme chosen under fluorescent tubes can merge under the LED fittings now going into refurbished Oxfordshire halls, so we check the colours in the room itself, in daylight and with the lights on, before any paint goes down. Line widths follow the governing bodies, and on timber the lines sit between coats of seal so they wear with the finish.
The price is driven by area, the depth of timber remaining, the number of sports marked and whether you need holiday or overnight working. We survey without charge and give a fixed, itemised quotation, so the figure you take to committee is the one you pay.
Yes, from Banbury and Bicester through Oxford to Abingdon, Didcot and Henley, and across the neighbouring counties and the rest of the UK. Our own team travels with its own machinery, and travel is shown as a separate line in the quotation.
Yes. We sequence the halls before the first one starts, with individual start and reopening dates for each, and move crews and machinery between sites in a planned order. Because we do not subcontract, the same team and standard arrive at the last school as at the first.
A solid timber floor kept on a screen and recoat cycle lasts fifty years or more, taking four or five full sands over that time. Sports vinyl and polyurethane systems typically give fifteen to twenty five years depending on use, and are replaced rather than resanded.
The hall dimensions, a few photographs of the whole floor and the worst areas, the sports you play, the hours you can give us and the date you need the hall back. That gets a useful first answer. A fixed price follows a free site survey.
No. The visit, the measurements, the moisture readings and the written report are free and carry no obligation. The report is yours to keep, and it is often used to get budget approved before any work is ordered.
Usually moisture. The boards have taken on water from a damp slab or a leak and expanded, and with the perimeter gap filled or too small they have nowhere to go but up. We find the source, dry the floor, then relay or replace the affected area and reinstate the gap.
No. Courtship Flooring works only for schools, colleges, universities, leisure operators, clubs and councils. Domestic sanding and restoration is handled by our sister company, Ryan’s Restorations, and we can pass an enquiry across for you.
Book a free survey of your sports hall, studio or stage floor in Oxfordshire. We will assess it, say what it needs and give you a fixed price and a firm reopening date. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.