painting conundrum

We are painting our living room. We put it off for weeks, while our living room furniture languished in the back room. We had to have the floors redone, the chimney cleaned, the ceiling patched, the picture window sill stripped, the walls scrubbed of soot and grime, the peeling paint removed, the holes mudded, the grape juice stains bleached, the crayon removed, the dings patched, and several parts of the damaged plaster on the arches bolstered. We're finally done with the prep work and in the middle of painting.

We use Glidden ceiling paint. It's pink! It has a coloring agent in the white paint that allows you to see what you're painting so you don't miss spots. It dries white. We learned the hard way, however, that it's not the best choice for a small bathroom. When the surface gets wet, the pink re-activates, and you end up with temporary pink spots on the ceiling. I suppose this would change over time, but we decided not to chance it and repainted with a mildew-resistant semi-gloss.

Here's the conundrum. Our living room has a small fireplace that was painted white for some reason, and because the flue is located near the front of the fireplace (the chimney sweep sez this is a design flaw common to this neighborhood), it is marred with soot. The wall that holds the fireplace has (I assume added) wood paneling that we don't particularly like. It also has one strip of ceiling molding (to hide top of panels?), and the rest of the room has none. Worst of all, it has corner molding that only goes to about 2 inches from the ceiling molding. I'm assuming we need all the molding (or some replacement) for the paneling. How does one disguise this crappy job? Is it possible?

Also, what should be done about the soot problem? We citrus-stripped on part of the brick, and it's a nice red color brick underneath the paint. I'm not too excited about stripping the brick, having been really dissuaded by the goopy, icky job of just stripping the wood trim on one part of one window. But if we paint the brick again in white, and paint the mantel in white, it will soon be sooty. If we strip the mantel and stain it (it appears to be maple), it will look nicer, but maybe odd in a room that has all white-painted wood trim.

We're going to paint it in the trim color for now, but I think a stripping project is in our future. I have no ripping clue what to do about the molding, though.