high frets on cheap guitar

a couple year s ago i bought a cheap ltd guitar it costs about 200 usd (lost my gibson lp to a pawn shop few years earlier when i was laid off) up graded all pots and pickups and it's was ok over all,but a few months ago it started bottoming out in the high frets had a friend check it out who's a bit of a guitartech and he found it had a couple high frets and as it stands it would cost more than half what i paid for it to fix it and now i have to have the action so high on the thing it's a real drag to play is there something i can do myself to try and fix it or is it a lost cause

So the guitar played fine up until a couple months ago?

Assuming your friend knows what he is doing/talking about, there won't be much you can do. There is a possibility that your neck is bowed. A truss rod adjustment would help if it is, but if you don't know what you're doing it could ruin the guitar. For truss rod adjustments, less is more.

he's built a few acoustic guitars and mandolins so one thing is for sure he knows more than I,I'd love to learn myself but the tools are so expensive maybe i'll look to see if a local shop will look at it for free or at least not to much money then i'll know without a doubt if it's worth fixing

Ya it sounds like he would know. Fretwork does get complicated. A local shop should definitely LOOK at it for you for free. Just bring it to them and ask all the questions you need. It's the actual fixing part they'd charge for. Get's pricey if fretwork needs to be done.

A typical setup would cost $50-75 I think. That is normally just regular maintenance. It would get to the $100 range once things need to be done to the frets usually.

Could you mask either side of the high frets and then sandpaper a little and finish with wire wool to take some of the height off. Little by little, this approach might help. Otherwise a new guitar neck could be in order.

Late....

but, you can get a fret leveling tool from stew-mac.com

this happens to guitars and it's nothing serious. people don't often wear the frets 15-2X as fast as they wear the frets from 1-13/14 so what you end up getting is a "fretout" situation in that area of the fretboard. you can compensate a little with a setup but ultimately you'd have to go to a higher action to completely get rid of it...

Like i said, you can get a fret level and just sand down and redress those frets to match the height of the rest.

you can only do this so many times before you'd need to refret or get the frets dressed.