[NJblue]

Unless you really don't like the pinestraw mulch, you don't need to get rid of it right away. Both our house and our neighbor's are a year and a half old and still have the original pinestraw mulch. It's getting kind of thin, but our service sprays it once in awhile and the weeds stay at bay pretty well. By waiting to put the final mulch down, you have more flexibility in terms of tweaking your landscape. Once you put down stone, landscape fabric and especially curbing, it becomes much harder to make changes.

I'm getting ready to replace it but I haven't found a mulch that I like yet. The stones are too light colored for our taste. I'm reluctant to use shredded hardwood since it will need replacement a lot. A neighbor just had pine bark put in and it looks really great - a nice deep rich brown ... exactly what we are looking for. However, in looking at houses that have been around for awhile the deep brown seems to fade into an unattractive gray. Right now I'm leaning toward rubber. I have seen some at Lowes with a nice brown color and the pieces are shredded to actually look like hardwood mulch as opposed to chunks of ground up tires which some rubber mulch looks like.