Bunkies

Bunkies
Season 02, Episode 24
Air Date	February 21, 2003
Written By	Bob Thomas
Directed By	Anson Williams
Episode Guide
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Bunkies is the twenty fourth episode of Lizzie McGuire's second season.

Summary

All the kids at school are asked to put their hand prints on a wall, symbolizing unity. A water pipe bursts in a wall in Matt's room and to Lizzie's horror she'll have to share her room with her brother for a week until the repairs are done.

Plot

A water pipe bursts in a wall in Matt's room and to Lizzie's horror she'll have to share her room with her brother until the repairs are done. That doesn't look like it will be anytime soon, as the McGuires have hired a repairman who could have come straight out of the movie The Money Pit. Predictably, the pairing of Matt and Lizzie doesn't work at all. They fight about everything--he wants the window open, she wants it closed; she wants the shade down, he wants it up; he wants the door closed, she wants it open. All the bickering keeps Mr. McGuire, already frazzled by the repairman, awake all night.

Lizzie's not doing too good at school, either. The spacey art teacher Ms. Dew has come up with an idea for a school "unity" project: all the students will dip their hands in paint and put their handprints on a blank wall, making a mural. But instead of promoting unity, the students break into cliques, and Lizzie, Miranda and Gordo don't fit into any of them, not Kate and the cheerleaders, not Ethan and the "perfect hair" people, not even Tudgeman and the sci-fi freaks. Mrs. McGuire has her own inspirational idea: she wants to paint the front door a color that represents the occupants--only she's not sure what color and what it should stand for, so she ends up going through the rainbow.

Back at home, Mr. McGuire takes a drastic step to force Lizzie and Matt to get along. He takes all their possessions out of the room, leaving them only a couple of sleeping bags, so they will concentrate on getting along. Matt and Lizzie quickly realize that they must at least appear to be cooperating if life is going to get back to normal, so they start acting as if things couldn't be better between them. This makes their dad pround of his plan, but their mom sees right through their sweetness-and-light routine. Finally, after about a week, the repairman gets done fixing Matt's room and extorting money from the McGuires, by which time the siblings have learned to live together.

At school, Lizzie, Gordo and Miranda search desperately for some group the can be a part of for the unity project, but everyone rejects them--the drama club, the jocks, and even the chess club! Finally, they realize that they don't have to be part of another group, that the only group they truly care about are the three of them, so they don't worry about where their handprints go on the wall, except that they be together. It turns out that the unity project worked after all, as the three friends visit the wall again and can't tell which of the hundreds of handprints belong to themselves.