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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Surrey and across the UK. Much of our work is for independent schools and racquets clubs, where presentation is scrutinised as closely as performance.
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
A hall photographed for a prospectus or walked through on an open day is judged on detail: consistency of colour across the whole area, crisp edges to the markings, and no visible patching where repairs were made.
That comes from preparation rather than product. Boards matched properly by species and grade, sanding taken to a genuinely even finish, and seal applied in the correct number of coats with proper curing. It takes slightly longer and it is entirely visible in the result.
Squash floors are left unsealed so the bare timber provides grip, which makes them a specialist job rather than a variation on a sports hall. Dust control becomes critical, the preparation is different, and standard lacquer systems are simply wrong.
We sand, repair and maintain squash courts to the standard competitive play requires, phasing multi-court work so the club keeps playing throughout. Doing courts alongside the main hall in a single visit costs far less than two separate mobilisations.
A crest or club badge at centre court changes how a hall reads, and for schools it earns its cost in prospectus photography alone. Applied properly it is not a sticker: the artwork goes into the floor finish and is sealed beneath the final coats.
That means it wears at exactly the same rate as the surface around it rather than lifting at the edges. Send us artwork and we will advise on sizing and placement against the court lines.
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
Basketball wears a floor in two rectangles. The keys take every rebound, post move and landing, and the finish there can be through to bare timber while the rest of the court still looks respectable.
We mark to current FIBA dimensions: a 28 by 15 metre court with the three point line at 6.75 metres from the centre of the basket, reducing to 6.6 metres in the corners. The restricted area is a rectangle with a no charge semi circle, not the trapezoid still found in many older halls, which is usually the giveaway that a court has not been set out properly in decades.
Sole marking is the other characteristic problem. Basketball shoes grip, and that grip transfers rubber across the whole surface. On a well sealed floor it cleans off. Where the seal has gone thin it works into open grain and stops coming out.
A coloured key or a crest at centre court is applied between coats so it wears with the floor rather than scuffing off, and it costs least while the floor is already open.
Community buildings ask more of a floor than almost anything else, because the same square metres take a toddler group, a badminton club, a parish meeting, a fitness class and a wedding reception in the same week.
The characteristic damage is scoring from chairs and tables going out and back constantly, rather than the concentrated wear a sports hall shows. That is good news, because fine scoring sands out easily and these floors usually have plenty of timber left.
The other characteristic is decades of polish. Many community halls have been polished for thirty years, and that build up has to be removed chemically before sanding or it clogs every abrasive. We allow for it rather than discovering it.
We quote these jobs by element so a committee can see exactly what each part costs and phase it across two years if the funds require. That transparency matters more here than anywhere, and it is why much of this work comes by recommendation from one committee to another.
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.
We have been trading since 1987, and the reason a firm lasts that long in this trade is that people call it back rather than calling somebody else.
Our work is guaranteed, and if something is not right we come back and put it right. That sounds like the least anybody should offer, and in this industry it is not as universal as it should be.
What we will not do is guarantee against things outside our control. A floor sealed over a slab we advised was too wet, a hall where the cleaning regime uses polish despite the guidance, or damage from a leak in the building are not workmanship issues, and we will explain the distinction at the time rather than in the small print.
Equally, we will tell you before we start when we think a job carries risk. If a floor is marginal, if a repair may not match perfectly, or if a stain may not fully come out, you will hear it at survey. Managing expectations honestly is a large part of why this works.
Surrey gives us a heavy weighting towards independent school sport, alongside academy estates, leisure operator facilities and private clubs.
Independent school sports halls, gymnasia and squash courts are a substantial part of it. These are usually well maintained buildings where expectations of finish quality are high, the work is planned a long way ahead into fixed holiday windows, and a good proportion is preventative screen and recoat rather than full refinishing. That is exactly how a sports floor should be run, and it is why those floors last.
Squash courts feature more here than in many counties. A court polished smooth through the middle needs a matt high grip specification rather than a general sports lacquer, and it is a genuine injury risk rather than an inconvenience.
We completed work at St George Ascot nearby, including a Granwood restoration others had written off.
Leisure centres, clubs and community halls make up the rest, with the usual mix of overnight working and committee budgets.
St George School in Ascot is our closest comparable project for Surrey, and it is the one we point to most often when somebody has been told their floor is finished.
The hall had a Granwood floor which more than one contractor had written off as due for replacement. Granwood is a composite of wood flour and cement pressed into blocks and laid in a bitumen bed. It is not timber, it has no grain, and sanded like timber it is permanently damaged. Replacement would also 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 sanding. It was then coated with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates, with the line markings applied within the system.
The school now has a hall floor that looks renewed and has years of life left, at a fraction of the cost of replacement.
Court relining can be done either way, and the cost difference between them is larger than most facilities expect.
Marking during a sand and seal is always the best value. The floor is already back to bare timber, the setting out sits inside a programme you are paying for anyway, and the lines finish under the new lacquer where they are protected. There is no second closure and no second mobilisation.
As a standalone visit, relining is still a modest job. A typical multi sport hall takes two to three days including preparation, setting out, painting and the seal coat over the top. That is a genuine option where the floor finish is sound and only the line marking has gone.
What is not worth doing is applying markings onto a finished floor and leaving them exposed. It is quicker and cheaper on the day, and it is why so many halls need remarking every few years. If your last set of lines lifted within a season or two, that is almost certainly what happened to them.
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. Overnight shifts, weekend blocks, phased sections and holiday programmes are all standard. We agree which sessions are affected before anything is booked out.
Compressed wood-composite blocks laid in a brick-like pattern, common in halls built from the 1950s to the 1980s. It cannot be sanded like timber and needs a specialist coating system instead.
We have, as far as Saudi Arabia. International projects are planned as complete programmes with everything agreed and priced in advance.
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.
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.
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.
No. Every job is carried out by our own directly employed team using our own machinery. It is why we can commit to a finish date and why the standard is the same on the last day as the first.
Yes. We work as the specialist flooring element within refurbishment schemes and are used to main contractor site rules, inductions, permits and progress reporting.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Surrey 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.