Greening My Home

I don’t know how helpful this will be, but we live in a Queenslander (up on stumps like yours) and had to put a privacy screen on our bathroom window – small blocks mean our neighbour’s kitchen is about 2.5 metres from our bathroom window. We wanted to be able to open our windows outwards, but retain some light too. We built a frame the correct size – a little larger than the windows- and covered it with shade cloth (tacked it around the outside and put the ugly side to our neighbour’s). It was made from treated pine so it was light enough to maneuver. We then put up a frame onto our house. This was done using right angle brackets attached to the wall, and then attaching some treated pine 2″ x 4″ pieces to them to hold the screen out far enough to let us open the windows. The frames were screwed in by us hanging out the windows, since we were working about 3m up. We then pulled the screen up with ropes, and with a bit of acrobatics, and hanging out the window, screwed it into the frame. And the acrobatics were made all the more fun by working in our bath, which is under the windows. We are lucky- the exterior of our house is hardwood weatherboard, so finding a beam was not necessary, but if you have (or can borrow) a stud finder (an electronic gadget you run along walls which beeps when there is a stud there- and no, it doesn’t work with the blokey kind of stud, my goofy hubby tried it:] ) then you can see if there are studs close to the windows. Most houses will have framing close to windows – there has to be some structure to hold the windows in place. It ended up being a pretty cheap fix for us. We could have gone fancy and got proper aluminum powder coated screens made up- but we didn’t care about beauty or views, since it was on the neighbour’s side. Still there 10 years on, although the shade cloth is looking a bit dirty, as we chose a light colour to allow light in.
I couldn’t see from your photos if it might be possible for you to attempt this. Depends on how handy you and hubby are. We couldn’t remove our windows- this would have made it a bit simpler. We did consider hiring a scissor lift too, but we’re too stingy to shell out for it.
That said, fast growing trees would be much more beautiful, greener and simpler.