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Hi! I successfully re-colored some Maxis walls and floors and thought I'd share how I did it. These instructions assume a basic understanding of Farout, Photoimpact (or other paint program) and Homecrafter. If you're not familiar with these programs, use these links to download and install them and take some time to fool around and get acquainted before you start. I use Photoimpact, so if these instructions won't work with PSP or other paint programs, I apologize. Hopefully everyone will be able to figure out their paint program's equivalent to the Photoimpact commands.
Addendum:
As suggested by 'yy4me_simphomania' at The Sims
Florist Group, SimWallcat found at Simwardrobe
exports the wall files to a .bmp, which should simplify the wall editing process
if you'd like to try it. As with the other programs, if you're not
familiar, take your time and play around with it a bit. 
NOTE: To save on bandwidth usage, at the top of your browser window click 'File' 'Save As' and save these instructions to your favorite place on your hard drive. I've got mine in c:\My Documents\My Webs\Recolor Walls and Floors\. This should save the .html and pictures, so you can simply double click the .html file and access them anytime you like from your hard drive rather than the internet.
Skip the Walls go straight to Floors
In
order to 'see' the wall and floor files, you have to have either Homecrafter or
a .far extracting program that allows a preview image. In order to install
the walls and floors, you have to have Homecrafter. Start by
downloading and installing Farout and Homecrafter. This is not an
endorsement for Farout, I just found that I got a better picture of some walls
and floors using Farout for the screen capture rather than using
Homecrafter. Using Farout, open the expansion pack that has the walls you
want to recolor ( in this example I opened c:\Program Files\Maxis\The
Sims\Expansion Pack\ExpansionPack.far. Select the wall you want to copy
and press and hold the 'Alt' key and press 'Print Screen'. This should
'capture' an image of the Farout window, including the image of the wall.
(If you're satisfied with the screen captures using other programs, that's cool
too, the idea is to get a decent image copied to your paint program.)
Open your paint program and Paste as a new image.
Using
your selection tool, carefully select just the wall image. Crop the
picture.
Use
your favorite method of re-coloring, play around have some fun.
Save
as a .bmp to your Homecrafter directory.
Open
Homecrafter and select the wall tool. Click the Load an Image button.
Browse
to the Homecrafter directory and select the .bmp you saved.
Test out your re-colored wall. If you like it, click to change the name,
price and description. (Note, your walls will display in order of the
price, so if you'd like to keep all your re-colored walls together, make them
all the same price.) I use my descriptive file name as the wallpaper name,
so I can easily find it if I want to delete it later.
Click
the Export button and Save to c:\program files\Maxis\The Sims\Game Data\Walls.
Next time you open your game, you will find your newly re-colored Maxis
walls. 
As shown by this
example, some walls still are not going to look so great when you 'Alt-Print Screen'
them, even with Farout. If you know of any other program that provides a
higher quality image when screen capturing the walls, please feel free to share.
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