IPSWICH: Bad luck is said to come in threes.

But don’t tell that to unlucky Ipswich resident Wayne Cutting who is nervously awaiting his next slice of misfortune.

The 35-year-old is facing a �20,000 repair bill after his home was struck by lightning on Monday evening.

And if you thought that was unlucky just a month earlier a burst water pipe devastated his kitchen, requiring the entire room to be stripped out.

Wayne was at work in Colchester on Monday when a lightning bolt devastated his home in Oak Eggar Chase around 4pm.

The strike smashed a hole in the roof, caused ceiling damage to every upstairs room and blew a plug and aerial socket from the wall.

“I was shocked and gutted to be honest,” said Wayne, who has been forced to move into a hotel. “I’d only just finished decorating the house myself.”

The strike is awful timing for Wayne – his two-and-a-half year-old son Oscar was due to visit him this weekend and spend his first night in his newly-decorated room.

“The worst part was my son’s bedroom,” he added. “It’s all the disruption, it’s probably going to take until Christmas to get it back to how it was.”

With Wayne at work firefighters had to force their way into his semi-detached property, but the lightning strike did not ignite a blaze.

“I hope not to have any more bad luck but I’ve had two in a month,” added Wayne. “But it’s just one of those things, it’s an act of God.”

Police had contacted him, asking him to go home, saying an officer would call him to tell him exactly what had happened.

“I thought they were going to say I’d been burgled, which would have been a shock but it was even more shocking than that. I was expecting to come home to a rubble of bricks.”

Karl Lund, 42, who lives next door to Wayne, said he was upstairs when the lightning bolt hit.

He said: “It was almost like a cannon going off behind our house.

“I was upstairs and the baby was in bed – when it hit I could feel the pressure of it inside the house.”

n Do you know anyone unluckier than Wayne? Write to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN or e-mail eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk