Home insurance in Washington starts with your policy, your deductible, and the claim the weather is pushing you toward. West of the Cascades the loss is often water that worked through a roof or a wall after weeks of drizzle, and the question is whether that was sudden. East of the Cascades the loss is more often wind, hail, or a pipe that froze. Those are different pages of the same conversation. Have the declarations page in your hand before you invent a version of events.
Read the dwelling limit, and read any wind or hail deductible that sits apart from the ordinary one. What you once paid for the house is not the figure the page uses for the dwelling. Ask whether water that rose from the ground, or backed up through a drain, is inside this policy at all. A leak at a flashing and a crawl space full of groundwater are not one cause. If you cannot find a separate wind deductible, say that you looked and did not find one.
Photograph the slope from the ground and the room that stained. Note the day you first saw the damage and whether water is still moving. Hail bruise on a basin roof is one kind of evidence. A soft soffit after a long marine wet spell is another. Do not haul soaked material to the curb before you have pictures and have made this call. The cause is what the claim turns on, and a cleaned-up scene is a weaker story.
Say the town, how old the roof is in plain words, and whether a claim is already open. If you are setting two policies next to each other, set the exclusions and the deductibles next to each other too. Wording that replaces the dwelling and wording that pays a worn roof differently will change the result. Bring the page. Leave the story you heard from another county out of the first minute.
The drizzle or the freeze will not pause while the page sits in a drawer. Stand where you can see the damage and describe the cause in one plain sentence, with your deductible already read. Call the number on this page.