Advice please - I'm missing X-reference files

You will probably get lots of different answers.

Five houses doesn’t seem that much so, if it were me, I would probably have one master file with scenes for the various houses.

I like the Sonder approach that keeps the main file detail to a minimum but makes use of a lot of separate drawings for details, many of which repeat from project to project. They can then be drawn into the final Layout output.