How to remove countersunk baluster screws

The height is generally from the front of the tread straight up to the top of the handrail.

To get the brackets at the right height, you'll need to do some measuring and marking.

Measure the bracket top to bottom (if its height isn't already stated in the literature). You can allow for the thickness of the handrail by resting it on the stairs and measuring how high its top is above the front of the tread. Subtract those two numbers from the height you want the railing to be at to get the height for the bottom of the bracket if it were installed directly above the front of the tread.

Mark that height at the top and bottom steps and draw a line through them (if you can get a helper or two, you should have a nice straight piece of wood of just about the right length to hand; otherwise a straight-edge, the longer the better so that the line is in as few segments as possible). Your stair may not be perfectly even and regular, so you may want to measure the height above each tread and adjust the line accordingly if some of the measurements are out of the allowed range.

Finally, take your stud finder, locate the studs and install as many brackets as you need. The bottom of the bracket should be touching the line you've just drawn.

I don't think there's a good answer to this because plumbing needs a full stack, from the drain in the ground, to the vent in the roof. When you move utilities from one location to another, if you haven't changed the room above, you're stuck with lines on both new and old locations in the floors you've renovated until you're done with the renovation. And if you try to move utilities without first renovating the rooms below, you either have to open the rooms up below or run connections from the new back to the old location. In the end, I fear that you're going to spend more money trying to do it one part at a time rather than saving up until later and doing it all at once.

To partially answer your question, when we are building a new home, we construct from the ground up, for structure, and it's also the source of utility lines so they go the same way. When we finish the build, we go from the top down. This way we aren't tracking dirt over finished carpeting and scratching up freshly painted walls.