Try asking yourself, "What can vertical forts can do for YOU?"
Generally, trying to make things stacked vertically can often make it easier to cram plenty of things into a smaller overall area. Those little dangling bedrooms? Look how far the bedrooms on the ends of the halls are from the doorway. Take a look
here on the wiki for some good ways to throw down some residential structures.
Remember, you can designate a whole slew of rooms, but hold off on designating the stairs to get to them to allow you to mark on your map where the digging will take place, but hold off on actually sending your miners there to dig them out until you have either the demand for the extra rooms, or nothing better to do.
Noise really doesn't work right.
Workshops do not cause noise. At all. A hauler can fall asleep in the forge, and won't wake up while the smith makes a new set of platemail two feet from his head.
Placing furniture, however, causes
tremendous amounts of noise, that can wake up dwarves after just two or three pieces of furniture being moved, and affects everything within a 33-tile cube centered on the piece of furniture you place, which typically means furnishing a residential room with a door and a bed is what causes the most noise, and has pretty much been the only things that ever wakes a dwarf up in my experience. Hence, the noisiest areas that are worst to sleep in are residential areas, while the industrial areas are the quietest.