Looks inviting, doesn’t it? A professional home stager can help you achieve this look when you sell your home.

Let’s face it – not all of us are design geniuses. We may keep our homes spic and span, with everything in its place, but that place still might not show off its qualities to greatest advantage when it comes time for you to sell it.

We may know all the little things we need to do to make the inside of our homes more appealing to buyers, like getting rid of clutter and removing peculiarly personal mementoes or odd knicknacks, but we may still not have our home in ready-for-its-closeup condition.

In such cases, it makes sense to engage the services of a professional home stager. Home stagers are interior design specialists who focus on turning sellers’ homes into show pieces. They know the little tricks that turn a room from ho-hum to dazzling, where and how to place furniture to maximize the appearance of spaciousness, and the steps to take to downplay a home’s defects.

And in just about all cases, they can do it with the objects you already own.

What’s more, hiring a home stager can be an excellent investment. A survey conducted by the HomeGain website found that professional staging produced a $1,780 average boost in a home’s selling price, or a 586 percent return on investment.

Which means that if you can afford it, hiring a professional stager can result not only in a faster sale of your home, but also a more profitable one. The Philadelphia area has many talented, knowledgeable home stagers to choose from.

Tomorrow – Saturday, May 4 – “the hippest street in town” will become even more of a playground from noon to 8 p.m.

During those hours, South Street from 2nd to 8th streets and 2nd from South to Lombard will be closed to traffic for the first-ever South Street Headhouse District Spring Festival, an afternoon-long celebration featuring food, music, crafts, shopping, fun for the kids, and more.

The street will also be a stage, with featured bands performing hourly on the main stage at 5th and South streets, a kids’ stage at 2nd and South featuring the School of Rock House Band and the Tune Up Philly youth orchestra, and other musicians and performers doing pop-up sets at satellite stages along the street.

Local restaurants and bars will turn out their best fare for the event – we’ll bet there will be specials – and hot dog emporium Hot Diggity will wheel out the mobile version of its South Street restaurant at the festival.

Discount parking is available at the lot on Columbus Boulevard at the foot of the South Street pedestrian bridge, and other area lots will also be open. Or save yourself the headache and take SEPTA to the event – or let Uber drive you there: the car service is offering users their first ride free with a special promo code for the event.

For more information about the festival, parking and the promo code, visit the South Street Spring Festival web page.

From the land before time to the time of your life: This year’s PIFA Street Fair is a real time-traveling experience.

If you had a time machine, where would you go?

The hundreds of local arts and cultural organizations participating in the PIFA Street Fair today on South Broad Street have as many answers to that question as there are places and times to visit.

This year’s fair is even bigger and more wide-ranging than its 2011 predecessor, with plenty of fun for kids of all ages. Whether it’s hanging out with prehistoric dinosaurs, rising above it all on the giant Ferris wheel,  catching a thrill on the carnival rides or partaking of the many family-friendly activities presented by the fair participants, you’re sure to have a good time no matter what era you wind up in at this year’s PIFA Street Fair,

The fair, which continues until 7 p.m., is the capstone event of the 2013 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which featured performances all over the city that took audiences forward into the past and back to the future, in keeping with this year’s theme, “If I Had A Time Machine.”

For more about this year’s festival and the Street Fair, visit the PIFA web site.

Fabulous million-dollar residences? Sure, we have ‘em. 1706 Rittenhouse Square, for instance, is full of ‘em. But other cities have even more.

We’ve noted before that among East Coast cities, Philadelphia stands out for its affordability. We’ve even offered at least one possible reason why over on our sister blog. Here’s another: There aren’t a lot of insanely rich folks buying super-luxurious houses here.

While we’ve featured some fantastic million-dollar-plus homes on our sites, most of what we sell is far more moderately priced. And judging from the latest Coldwell Banker Luxury Market Report, produced by Coldwell Banker Previews International, that statement applies to most Philadelphia-area real estate agents. Philly didn’t even crack the list of the top 10 cities for sales of homes priced at $1 million or greater. Those cities, with total sales for 2012, are:

1. New York (Manhattan), 2,382
2. Los Angeles, 1,533
3. San Francisco, 1,507
4. The Hamptons (Long Island), N.Y., 963
5. Miami, 790
6. Chicago, 713
7. Naples, Fla., 651
8. Washington, D.C., 646
9. San Jose, Calif., 589
10. Newport Beach, Calif., 561

Of course, there are plenty of luxurious residences in certain local zip codes: 19103, 19106, 19118 and especially 19035 immediately spring to mind.  But most of what gets built and sold here is more within your reach.