WASHINGTON AVE: a working treatment outline
Don't mind me, I'm just writing out the plot narratively. If you don't want the screenplay to be spoiled, don't click through!
The film starts with a funeral. Nana Tully's funeral, to be exact. Lex and Rowan Tully go through the motions of a good Irish wake, chatting with family members and friends they haven't seen in years. Both recently returned home for an indefinite amount of time. Lex dodges questions about her big startup job in Baltimore, while their mother, Kathy, does the averting of questions for Rowan regarding why he's not off making stained glass.
After the wake, Kathy tells Lex that she wants her to go down the shore to Lavallette, where Nana Tully's beach house is. There's a big storm coming (never named, but it's Hurricane Sandy from 2012), and Kathy and Lex and Rowan's father (Nana Tully's son) are concerned about looters hitting the house after the storm. Several family heirlooms, as well as items willed to both Rowan and Lex, are in that house. Lex refuses to go, since the storm is literally a day away and could hit at any second. Rowan, initially not allowed to go because of Kathy's "concern" for his mental state, convinces their mother to let him go with her, and Lex agrees.
When they arrive at the beach house the next day, they run into Nana Tully's next-door neighbor and former childhood friend, Dani Hubert-Martinez. She offers to assist the Tullys in finding the items Kathy wants, in an effort to get out sooner. The three enter the house, largely untouched since Nana Tully was placed in hospice care, but it's immediately evident that she was a hoarder. The three split up in the house, tackling different messes, looking for the things they need. They find nearly everything, along with old memories as they work. However, as they work, Lex and Rowan are at each other's throats at every chance they get. In fact, the arguing slows them down so much that by the time they're ready to go, an emergency shelter in place warning has gone out and they are unable to leave the house.
Dani makes them move their collection of items to the second floor preemptively, so that once the flooding hits they won't get damaged. They break off to blockade the windows and the balconies in the front-facing bedrooms, and decide to stay in the master bedroom for the night, as it's the most secure. The next day, the storm rages outside. In an effort to keep the warring siblings separate, Dani suggests that they deep-clean the second-floor rooms so that their parents don't have to worry about it after the storm, and to find anything else they might have missed before.
While cleaning out their parents' room, Rowan discovers a box full of home videos, meticulously dated with descriptions of what each tape has. He manages to get through one, of him, Lex, and Dani all playing on the deck, before the power cuts out. Rowan organizes the tapes chronologically, closes up the box, and places it in front of the closet and continues cleaning out the room. Meanwhile, Lex and Dani clean out the master bedroom, and get into an argument about Dani and Rowan's relationship (as perceived by Lex) when they were teenagers. Dani accuses Lex of being selfish, an accusation originally slung at Lex by Rowan. The argument results in Lex storming off to clean a different room.
While all in different rooms, a huge piece of debris smacks into the side of the house, breaking through the roof and ceiling and into the house, right through Lex and Rowan's parents' room. Lex and Dani help Rowan get as much as they can out of the room before a crack of lightning drives them out. The cardboard box holding the tapes is soaked, and the VHS tapes presumably ruined. As they barricade themselves in the master bedroom again, Rowan has a breakdown in front of Lex and Dani and it's revealed that the reason Rowan moved back in with their parents is that he had a psychotic episode that resulted in a suicide attempt, which landed him in a psychiatric ward for several days. He ended up getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and Kathy made him come home to recover and undergo treatment there before he returns to Hoboken.
Barricaded in, the only thing left for them to do is wait out the storm, which is projected to move on from the shore in the night. Rowan, exhausted from the breakdown, falls asleep in the bed. Lex and Dani sit up, awake. Lex says that her anger from earlier stemmed from latent jealousy of her brother's relationship with Dani when they were teenagers, since, she confesses, she realized later that Dani was her first crush. Dani, in turn, confesses that she had also had feelings for Lex when they were younger, but the fragility of the situation prevented her from ever acting on it.
The next morning, the three of them wake up to the sound of silence - no rain slapping against the house. They cautiously go downstairs to find the damage pretty limited. A little bit of water damage in the carpets and the wooden furniture, but everything seems intact, save for the front of the house where the debris -- revealed to be a substantial piece of roof from the gazebo on the boardwalk -- broke through.
Both Dani's car and the pickup truck are ruined, so the three are effectively stranded until the travel ban is lifted, but the three of them stand on the front deck (miraculously still attached to the house), Lex and Dani holding hands, and survey the damage to the street and the debris all around, and can't help but laugh.