The front fireplace

I've never smelled a fireplace that's as bad as ours. The flue is closed and yet it still smells from time to time. Not all the time, but sometimes. So I cleaned it, and this helped some.

In addition to kind of smelling like a smoky fireplace, it's also not totally pretty inside:

That doesn't look so bad...

... but if I use the flash: 

While the prettiness of a fireplace is trivial, we don't even use it so it might as well look decent. Right?

So, I got some black Rustoleum heat proof paint (resists up to 1,000F) and painted the inside. Not only should this block in a lot of the smell, but it looks a lot nicer now too: