Someone please help me out.

We live in a third floor apartment which has a wood burning fireplace, it is a shorter flu going up the chimney and as a result, we sometimes get a little smoke in the apartment once in a blue moon while. My apartment has a loft and I have noticed that I will get a lot of wood smell up here anytime we have a fire. However, we use duraflame logs which are supposed to be less polluting then real wood. The main room which has the fireplace which is a lower floor doesn't put out a whole lot of smell, but down the hallway on the same floor, you could smell a little bit of fireplace/wood. We've had almost 30 fires or so since September, and I recently bought a Creosote Sweeping Log which we plan to burn soon, but the box says after 60 fires is when we should use it. Now tonight when having a fire, I didn't really see smoke coming in, but sometimes the flames will be big in the firebox which I think sometimes puts out more wood smell and my smoke alarm went off because of it. Is it because of the wood smell? Now the inside of my firebox does need to be cleaned such as walls inside it scrubbed which is something we do once in a while and of course, I think it's time for a CSL log which are rather expensive too. I have also noticed a lot of surfaces are getting black on them too. I changed a filter on my air cleaner last month and it's gotten quite black in spots again and I only run it when having fires because of how bad the smell gets in my loft area. What is causing all this? What should I do so that this isn't a major problem? Also, about a month to a month and a half ago, we had our wall repainted white because we did have a lot of smoke come in because we thought we had the damper open all the way but it wasn't. It's gotten quite black again and I would think only little smoke wouldn't make it that black.