Home insurance in Seattle is your policy, your deductible, and a claim that usually starts as a slow wet-season leak rather than a single dramatic afternoon. Drizzle works through a valley, a skylight, or a wall for weeks, and the page in the drawer decides whether that counts as sudden. Wind off the Sound can drive rain up under a tab on a Queen Anne or Magnolia slope. Have the declarations page out before you explain the ceiling to anyone.
Read the dwelling limit and the deductible you would actually face. Ask whether wind-driven rain through a failed flashing is treated differently from water that seeped for a season, and differently again from water that backed up a drain or rose against a downhill wall. A hillside daylight basement and a roof leak are not the same cause. If a wind or hail deductible is printed apart from the ordinary one, read that line too. If you do not see it, say you looked.
Photograph the stain, the soft soffit, and the slope from the sidewalk. Note when the mark first appeared and whether it grows on every stretch of rain or only when the wind has a direction. Do not scrape the only evidence off the plaster before this call. Seattle wet season damage often looks minor until the insulation above it is already heavy. The claim lives or dies on the cause you can describe.
Say the neighborhood only so the house type makes sense, then say what failed. A Ballard bungalow under firs and a newer townhouse with a flat roof do not present the same loss. If you are comparing policies, lay the exclusions and the deductibles beside each other. Bring the page. Leave a neighbor's outcome out of the first minute.
The long wet season will keep testing the opening while the page stays in a kitchen drawer. Stand under the stain, know your deductible, and describe the cause in one sentence. Call the number on this page.