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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in the Scottish Borders and across the UK. A rural region where single-visit programmes and honest prioritisation matter most.
We have been specialising in indoor sports and commercial timber floors since 1987. The business is family-run, nothing is subcontracted, and the crew who survey a building are the crew who work on it. Domestic and residential projects fall outside what we do and are looked after by 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
Where buildings are scattered and budgets constrained, the useful output of a survey is a ranked programme rather than a single price. Which floor is genuinely deteriorating, which is merely unattractive, and which needs only a clean.
Our reports separate those clearly with firm costs attached, so spending goes where it prevents deterioration rather than where the complaints are loudest.
Travel is a real cost, and paying it repeatedly for separate small jobs is the most common avoidable expense in rural facility management.
Grouping work into a single visit, whether across one organisation or between neighbouring facilities, spreads that cost and reduces it for everyone. We will actively propose it where we can see the opportunity.
Most of our work comes from facilities we have looked after before, and that continuity has practical value. We know what is beneath the floor, what was done last time, which products were used and when the next intervention is due.
It removes guesswork, makes quotations more accurate, and means recommendations reflect the floor’s actual history rather than a single visit.
Harris Academy wanted a sports floor to match its ambitions, so we fitted a complete Junckers solid-beech sports system, the same Danish flooring specified in elite competition venues, finished with full multi-sport line markings.
An installation like that is a long-term statement: properly maintained, it will outlast every pupil currently on the roll. The project ran to programme from bare sub-floor to handover.
~ 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
Underfloor heating and timber sports floors can work together, but the combination has to be designed rather than assumed, and we see the consequences when it is not.
Timber moves with moisture content, and heating from below drives moisture out of the boards. If the system is run too hot, or brought up too quickly at the start of a season, boards shrink, gaps open and in extreme cases the floor cups or splits. None of that is repairable by refinishing.
The requirements are straightforward. Surface temperature has to be limited and controlled, the system needs commissioning and gradual warming rather than being switched on in October at full output, and the timber needs to be specified as suitable for use over heating.
Where we are installing over an existing system we will ask for the commissioning records and the operating parameters. Where we are refinishing a floor that has suffered from a badly run system, we will tell you that the finish is the symptom rather than the problem.
A school crest or club badge at centre court is one of the few things that genuinely lifts a hall for a modest cost, and it is far cheaper done during a refinish than as a separate visit.
Logos are painted from your own artwork between coats of seal, so they sit under the final lacquer and wear at exactly the same rate as the floor around them. Anything applied over a finished floor will scuff and peel within a season, whatever the supplier claims about it.
We work the artwork up to the correct scale for the circle or the area it is going into, and we show you a layout before anything goes down. Colours are matched to your own brand rather than approximated.
Coloured keys and zoned areas work the same way and have the same effect. A hall with a filled key in a contrasting colour reads instantly and looks designed rather than institutional, and it costs very little on top of work already underway.
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.
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.
The Borders bring us school sports halls, community leisure facilities and a large number of village and club buildings, spread across a wide rural area.
Journeys across the region take longer than the map suggests, so we plan the work as continuous blocks and bring everything with us rather than expecting to collect materials locally. That makes these projects more thoroughly planned than a job close to base.
School halls are the largest group, and in many Borders communities the school hall is the principal indoor sports space for the surrounding area, taking club training and community lettings alongside curriculum use. That produces considerably more traffic than the timetable alone would suggest.
Village halls and club buildings follow, and those old timber floors are usually in far better condition than they look under decades of polish, with plenty of board depth left.
Where several facilities in the region are considering work, sequencing them into one trip is well worth doing and brings the cost down for everybody.
Borders enquiries usually resemble one of two projects we are asked about regularly.
For school halls doubling as the area sports facility, Hornbury Academy in Wakefield is the closest comparison. A hall in constant use that had gone well past its refinish cycle, taken back to bare timber, damaged boards replaced, resealed, and remarked from measured governing body dimensions rather than traced from what was there.
For community halls, St Katherine Hall is the better parallel: an old timber floor buried under decades of polish, scored by chairs and tables, with plenty of board depth left underneath. The polish was removed chemically before sanding, and the hall is now good for another few decades.
Both illustrate the point about distance. Work in the Borders is planned as a continuous block with everything brought with us, which makes the dates more reliable, and sequencing several halls into one visit brings the cost down for everybody.
A good proportion of the relining we do is because a hall is being asked to do something different from what it was marked for.
Pickleball is the obvious recent example. It shares its footprint with badminton, so adding it is usually a matter of the kitchen lines and a centre service line rather than a whole new court. Walking netball, short mat bowls and indoor cricket all turn up for the same reason: a facility has picked up a new user group and the floor has not caught up.
The temptation is to add the new sport on top of everything already there. In a hall that already carries five sets of markings that makes the floor genuinely hard to use, so we would rather look at the whole scheme and take something off at the same time.
We will ask what is actually played now, in what proportion, and set out a hierarchy where the sport used most gets the clearest colour and the most visual weight. Fewer lines, correctly dimensioned, beats more lines every time.
It depends on what the floor actually needs. A deep clean is the least expensive intervention, a recoat sits in the middle, a full sand and seal above that, and replacement is the rare last resort. We survey free of charge and price every realistic option so you can choose on evidence.
All of it, plus the surrounding region. Everything is surveyed, agreed and priced before we set off, so there are no additional travel charges appearing partway through a project.
Yes, and we do regularly. If a floor needs nothing more than a proper clean, that is what we will say. It costs us a job and earns us the next five.
Yes, and it is the norm. Each sport is marked to its governing body specification in a distinct colour, with the layout planned so the primary court reads instantly. Crests and badges can be sealed in at centre court.
It depends on the depth remaining above the tongue, which we measure rather than guess. A floor sanded sparingly may have several cycles left; one machined every few years may have none.
Heating dries the air, the boards give up moisture and shrink. It is normal seasonal movement rather than a fault, and it closes again in summer. Keeping the building humidity more stable reduces it.
An area elastic floor deflects across a wide area when loaded, which suits ball sports. A point elastic floor deflects only where loaded, which suits fitness and dance. Combined systems provide both.
Yes, and we set out from measured dimensions rather than copying existing lines. Courts remarked by tracing the previous set drift over the years, and many halls turn out to be dimensionally out.
Yes, and we recommend doing both together. Stages are usually in worse condition than the hall floor, and one visit costs considerably less than two while giving a consistent finish.
Sealed vacuum extraction on all machines including edge equipment, screening of the working area, and agreement with your site team on isolating doors and air handling routes.
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 Scottish Borders 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.