B****y garage!!

I'm still going around with the car looking like a wreck. The insurance send me a letter asking me to take the car to a garage to have the damage assessed and an estimate of how much it'll cost to fix it so they can charge the other driver insurance. That's supposed to be free of charge.
So far so good.

The problem now is that when I went to the garage that they recommended me, the people there say that they need to dismantle the car to check if there's any internal or unseen damage.
OK.
Then they say that once they dismantle the car they may not be able to put it together again (Humpty Dumpty style). So they say that it made sense to do everything together, the assessment and the repairs.
Of course, in order to be able to do that they need me to pay upfront for the job and then wait for the other insurance to refund me. They hastily added that it's the best option for me because as the lorry was foreign it may take up to a year or a year and a half to sort everything out and get my money back. So to do it at once will save me time and money in the long run as the car will get worse if it has to wait for a year to get fix.
Plus they are not able to tell me how much the repair will actually cost without taking the car apart! But we may be talking of anything from 1,000€ to 2,000€.

I hate garages. Is it only me or are they really out there trying to get us women to pay extra and/or do unnecessary work?

I tried calling the the insurance office to hear from them that it really may take a year to get the money but there's nobody at the other end of the line who can give me advice! They didn't know and promised to call me back asap which means never in Spain.
Tomorrow I'm going in person to their office in town to try and get an answer because if I must pay to get the car fix I'll have to take a loan or pay with the credit car and nobody will pay me back the interests on that.
And also is the matter that while the car is in the garage I'm not going to to be able to go to work. Here the concept of courtesy car is that they have a car available for you to hire at actually worst rates that hiring in Europcar or the local Pepecar!!

A total rip off!