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The simplest way to judge a flooring contractor is to look at floors they have actually delivered. These are ours: universities, academies, leisure centres, independent schools and community halls, across installation, refurbishment and specialist restoration.
Every project below was carried out by our own team. Courtship Flooring is a commercial contractor established in 1987, working across the UK and internationally.
Aston University, Birmingham. Years of heavy use had left the sports hall floor dull, patchy and worn along every busy lane. We sanded back to bare timber, repaired the damage and rebuilt the finish with a durable seal and a full set of new markings, working around a demanding academic timetable. The before and after photographs show what a properly executed refurbishment delivers.
University halls are among the most demanding environments we work in: short vacation windows, high usage and fixtures that cannot move. They are also where our approach to programming proves itself.
Harris Academy, Wakefield. A complete Junckers solid-beech sports system, the flooring specified in elite competition venues, installed from bare sub-floor and finished with full multi-sport markings.
Hornbury Academy, Wakefield. Our installation project documents the full journey from sub-floor preparation through to a finished, line-marked hall, delivered to a fixed programme.
De Wint School. A floor at the end of its seal, grey through the middle with markings closer to guesswork than instruction, sanded back, resealed and re-marked inside a planned holiday window.
Liskeard Leisure Centre, Cornwall. A complete programme of sanding, re-lining and resealing returned the main hall to service looking like a new installation, delivered a long way from base and still on schedule.
Medina Leisure Centre. Full refurbishment of the main sports hall floor with logistics planned in detail so the centre lost as little bookable time as possible.
The Bradfield Club. A gymnasium floor that had served generations, sanded back to life, repaired, resealed and re-marked on a community budget and an agreed date.
St George’s, Ascot. A Granwood block floor that decades of use had left dull and tired. Granwood cannot be sanded like timber, so we restored it with careful preparation and a modified epoxy coating system, keeping a serviceable floor out of a skip.
Treguib, South Wales. A hard-served sports hall floor taken back to clean timber, resealed and re-marked, delivered hundreds of miles from our base.
St Katherine’s Hall. A well-loved community hall floor rescued rather than replaced, and set for another few decades of everything it is asked to do.
The sports hall at Aston University had reached the point where the finish had worn through across the main traffic routes and the timber underneath was taking damage directly. The markings had faded to the point where several sports were difficult to officiate, and the hall was heavily booked by both the university and external hirers.
The complication was the programme. A university sports hall has no long summer shutdown in the way a school does, because summer conferences and external bookings fill the gap. We worked to a tightly defined window and staffed it accordingly.
The floor was sanded back to bare timber, damaged boards were cut out and replaced, and the whole hall was resealed with a two pack polyurethane system. The markings were set out fresh from current governing body dimensions rather than copied from the existing lines, and several redundant sets were dropped, which made the hall considerably clearer to use.
The floor handed back on the agreed date. It is the kind of job that demonstrates the point we make constantly: a floor that looks finished is often simply neglected.
Medina Leisure Centre presented the classic operator problem. The sports hall needed a full refinish, the centre could not afford to lose the booking income, and the surrounding facilities had to keep running throughout.
Our approach was to programme the work around the centre timetable rather than asking the centre to work around us. That meant early starts, late finishes and careful sequencing so that the noisiest operations happened when the rest of the building was quietest, and so that every coat had the cure time it needed without the hall sitting idle longer than necessary.
Dust control mattered more here than on a school site, because a leisure centre shares air handling between spaces and members notice immediately. Sealed extraction on all machines and proper screening of the working area kept the rest of the building usable throughout.
The hall came back with a restored surface, correct slip resistance and fresh markings. For an operator, the measure of a job like this is how few complaints reach the desk while it is going on, and by that measure it went well.
The hall at St George School, Ascot had a Granwood floor that had been written off by more than one contractor as beyond saving and due for replacement.
Granwood is a composite block laid in bitumen, not timber, and it needs an entirely different approach. Sanded like a timber floor it is destroyed, which is what had happened to parts of it over the years. Replacement would have meant lifting a bitumen bed with all the cost and complication that carries.
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 timber sanding. The floor was then coated with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates, with the line markings applied within the system rather than sitting on top of it.
The result is a hall floor that looks renewed and has years of life left in it, at a fraction of the cost of replacement. It is the job we point to most often when somebody has been told their Granwood is finished.
A large proportion of our work is in schools, and the constraint is always the same: the hall has to be back for the first day of term, with no negotiation available.
At Harris Academy and at Hornbury Academy in Wakefield, and at De Wint School, the pattern was similar. Halls in constant curriculum use, floors that had gone too long between refinishes, and a fixed window in which to do the work.
What makes those jobs work is planning rather than heroics. We survey properly so there are no surprises once the finish comes off, we order materials in advance, we staff the job to the programme rather than spreading a team across too many sites, and we build the cure times into the schedule rather than treating them as slack.
The other consistent element is markings. Every one of those halls carried lines for sports that were no longer taught. Removing them while the floor was open cost nothing and made each hall noticeably clearer, which is the cheapest improvement available in this trade.
Not every job is a large institution. A significant part of what we do is for clubs and community buildings where the committee is spending money it has raised itself, and that changes how we work.
At The Bradfield Club and at St Katherine Church Hall the brief was the same in substance: an old timber floor, decades of accumulated finish and polish, chair and table damage across the whole area, and a limited budget that had to be justified to a committee or a congregation.
In both cases the answer was restoration rather than replacement. The floors had plenty of timber left and the damage was almost entirely cosmetic, which is the situation where sanding and resealing transforms a room for a fraction of what people assume.
We quote these jobs by element so a committee can see exactly what each part costs and decide what to do now and what to leave. That transparency matters more to a village hall than to a leisure operator, and it is why so much of this work comes to us by recommendation from one committee to another.
Often, yes. We have finished work across the UK and are happy to help arrange a look at something comparable near you, or to share the full before and after photography for a project like yours.
We do, and we are glad to provide them. Most of our work comes from repeat clients or referrals, so there are plenty of people willing to speak about how a project ran.
Commercial and institutional work at scale: full sports halls, multi-court leisure facilities, specialist court installations and whole-estate programmes. We do not undertake domestic projects.
We have, as far as Saudi Arabia. International projects are planned as complete programmes with everything agreed in advance.
Yes. We can provide references from schools, academy trusts, universities, leisure operators and community halls, and we try to match the reference to the kind of organisation asking.
Yes, before, during and on completion. Those photographs form part of the handover pack and are genuinely useful when a business manager needs to show a board what was done.
It had been described that way by others, but no. Granwood needs a specialist approach rather than timber sanding, and once the blocks were rebedded and the correct coating system applied the floor had years of life left.
By programming around the centre timetable, sequencing the noisy operations for the quietest periods, and using sealed dust extraction and screening so the rest of the building stays usable throughout.
Yes, and a good proportion of our work is village and church halls. We quote by element so a committee can see what each part costs and phase it if the budget requires.
If any of these look like the floor you are responsible for, we would be glad to survey it and tell you honestly what it needs. Call 01823 674562.