What am I looking at here? Weird picture rail

[rhysjc]

We’ve just moved in to our new home and starting to look at redecorating. It’s a semi and all the rooms upstairs have a “semi pitched” ceiling on the external walls. I haven’t been up in to the loft yet to see how they’re constructed but that’s a bit beside the point.

One of the rooms has a picture rail around it, and on the external walls the section of the wall above the picture rail is set probably 5-10mm back relative to the section of the wall at the bottom. I’ve attached some pictures which hopefully illustrate this better than I can.

I can’t for the life of me think how this would be possible, given you’d expect the wall would join up with the pitched section as it does in other rooms

 

[rhysjc]

For what it’s worth, my theory is they’ve dot and dabbed some insulated plasterboard (given it’s an external wall) but instead of joining it up to the pitched ceiling they’ve whacked a picture rail on to try and conceal the gap

 

[big-all]

For what it’s worth, my theory is they’ve dot and dabbed some insulated plasterboard (given it’s an external wall) but instead of joining it up to the pitched ceiling they’ve whacked a picture rail on to try and conceal the gap

yes i would say to cover as a distraction rather than a feature but like yourself a sensible guess rather than a gtee answer