The goal in the medium term is to be able to determine the position of the new staircase. [...] Generally speaking, we need a plan that at a glance provides information about exactly what is below/above a certain room.
If that is the problem description, I don’t think the plan drawing software — aside from the already mentioned drawback that those with high potential also require a lot of familiarization — is the solution (and not even the direction where the solution would lie).
The
representation here is not demanding, so a drawing program, even from the shareware section, would be suitable; rather, the
measurement is the "level" where the problem lies.
Exactly where the work is tricky here, planning software does not relieve you of the work at all.
I would therefore recommend the following approach: first you need a basic sketch, gladly hand-scribbled, at a rough scale. You make one for each part of the building and for each level. In the first step, we’ll simply call the levels floors.
Then you select suitable points whose vertical alignment is certain: for example, an existing stairwell with the floor-ceiling "crossing" wall adjacent to the staircase.
You then look for a reference point in the ground plan of the ground floor, which you can track here by the floor-spanning line of sight into the upper floor. From this point on the plan, you then create a point in space by assigning it a height, for example 1.00 m above the top edge of the finished floor.
You now place a spirit level with a protractor against the aforementioned wall, because you want to ascertain whether the wall goes straight up (or how much it deviates from vertical), since you need a comparable reference point on the upper floor (and to find out where its plumb line is relative to the ground floor reference point).
On both floors, you then look for further reference lines whose relative positions to the "zero point" you can determine. Such lines run through door openings, so they can be tracked from the corridor into the rooms. Confirmed right angles (e.g. in the form of floor tiles) are your friend.
Once the principle is understood, visualization is just the cherry on top and can be done with ordinary off-the-shelf software.
For the next chapter (relating the building parts to each other), a transparent water-filled hose helps to align the height measurement points.